This game had a slow start, but surprised me with a twist that I think is one of Bioware's best yet.
However, the game was rather slow moving in the beginning. The start of the story will be very familiar with people who have played quite a few role-playing games before. You find yourself as the star student at your school outside of a small farming town in the middle of nowhere. However, everything isn't sunshine and rainbows as your fellow students may have suspected, and the town, along with the school, is soon destroyed. You and a friend of yours embark on a journey to save your master, who was captured during the attack. Not everything is as it seems, though, and the plot twists in the story line that take place only grow more complicated as you get closer to the end.
The characters that were thrust into my party seemed a little cheesy and badly written at first. After playing games with such fantastic characters such as Carth and Bastila from KOTOR, or Ashley and Kaidan from Mass Effect, the characters seemed dull to me. But after a while, more interesting npcs were added to my party, and I found that the older ones had more fascinating conversations to have with me. I soon really started to like the characters and their opinions on what was happening.
The gameplay itself isn't the greatest. The combat required a bit of button mashing on the mouse, and it all felt clumsy since I played the game on my laptop. I also felt that the difficulties of the combat you could select were too drastic from each other. I found that normal was way too hard to play on my laptop, but easy was hardly ever challenging. There were also some glitches in the game. While they weren't show stopping and were solvable, I had some issues in the beginning getting the game itself to run on my computer. There was a simple solution, though, and I didn't have any more problems with running the game after that.
Jade Empire is a great game in my opinion. I thought the story and characters of the game were some of Bioware's best, even though it takes a little bit for the speed of the game to pick up. Unfortunately, the game is a bit short. I usually take a very long time to complete a role-playing game, and this one only took me a little over 20 hours to play through. There are plenty of reasons to play the campaign again, though. And with how cheap the game is to download now, $15 is a fair price for some fantastic storytelling.