While not as good as its predecessor, Jedi Academy still proves to be an excellent, fast-paced, and wild adventure.
It's quite nice that the producers took into account what fanboys said. Having no freedom over Force choosing was a fairly annoying issue, but that was fixed here. One problem that was brought over from Jedi Outcast is that there is no map. It's not nearly as big of an issue as in Jedi Outcast, as Jedi Outcast's maps were humungous, sprawling landscapes filled with enemies and details. Academy's are significantly smaller, but still work. The lack of a map can be quite annoying. There is only one mission that includes a map, but it doesn't show where you are at all times, making it near useless.
Perhaps the best part of Jedi Academy is the gameplay. Nothing else really manages to defeat Jedi Academy's strong gameplay. Most missions consist primarily of you whipping out you lightsaber to cut down pretty much every enemy in sight. This is already extremely entertaining, as it has never been more satisfying to roll, stab an enemy, leap in the air and zap someone with lightning before flinging your lightsaber at another grunt to slice him up. The action looks and works great, and you'll have lots of great fight scenes.
Lightsaber combat is one of the games main highlights. Unlike Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy clearly spells out for you what all your moves are, unlocked or not. This helps a bunch, and it allows you to pull off all sorts of great moves. However, like Jedi Outcast, it does a very bad job of just standard combat. It doesn't tell you that combining movement with the attack button allowed you to do a variety of different moves, one of the key things of gameplay. It explains everything else very well (besides telling you how to access your force powers without having to use the quick keys).
Force powers are particularly entertaining to use. You'll have 4 "core powers", or powers you start out with. These are manually unupgradable, and are powers that are the most basic. These include: Force Jump, Force Speed, Force Push, and Force Pull. There are several other powers that are manually upgradable, unlike Jedi Outcast, where you were limited to waiting for your powers to get upgraded before using them. You can buy and upgrade whatever Force Powers you want to, which generally works as good as it sounds. Sadly, the Force Powers are wildly unbalanced. You might want to be a good guy, but you'll inevitably be drawn to the Dark Side powers, because they're extremely powerful. You can get through the entire game using Force Grip and Force Heal, both maxed out. Other attacks are just flashy. Things like Force Protect and Dark Rage are nice to have, but they never really help you at all.
Speaking of unhelpful things, before every mission, you're granted a variety of weapons to choose from. You lightsaber and blaster pistol are mandatory. You can choose from blaster rifles to rocket launchers, along with grenades and explosives. Sadly, everything but the lightsaber is pretty much useless. I would choose the rocket launcher and shotgun every time together with the thermal detonators, only to find that I would forget about them and just use my lightsaber through the whole mission.
The next greatest thing of the game is the interesting variety of missions. Every one of the missions is extremely fun, and all are very different from the previous. They mostly consist of slicing enemies apart, but some require you to do very interesting things, from disabling bombs to rescuing prisoners from rancors, from slicing speeder bikes in half while riding one yourself, to protecting Jawas from Tusken Raiders. The missions generally hit a lot more than they miss, although there are some awful missions (collecting ship parts in a giant-worm populated desert comes to mind).
The story generally is unimpressive. It sounds like something rather from an RPG game, complete with angry cults raising people from the dead, and absorbing force energy form planets. There is some Star Wars claptrap thrown in for good measure, complete with turning to the dark side and such. However, the story feels too disconnected, what with the missions never being cohesively connected, leading to some frustrations.
At about 2/3s through the game, you'll get a hold of a new lightsaber choice. You can gain Strong or Fast style, get the ability to dual-wield sabers, or wield the saber staff. I found that the safest choice was to get the last saber style you hadn't taken before. While you don't get any really flashy moves, your single saber is preferable to saber staff and dual-wielded sabers, specifically because the two cooler ones really are useless. Dual-wielding merely looks really cool, without actually being really cool. Staffs are really great and work brilliantly, were it not for the fact that you lose your ability to saber throw, resulting in moments where you will attempt to throw your saber but instead just kick violently.
You'll get some AI deficiencies. Most enemies are idiots, just standing around hoping to live. Dark Jedi are smarter but still can die easily from being launched off a cliff. Generally, the AI is pretty bad, and isn't that nice. You'll get by, of course, because killing guys is just so incredibly rewarding. You'll get a very large body count over the game, averaging 80 kills per mission (around 18 missions).
There aren't many technical issues. I didn't run into any glitches, and the frame rate is stable. However, some people may find the frame rate fairly bad for some reason. I would advise turning off Dynamic Glow.
Besides all this, Jedi Academy is a pretty good action game with a whole bunch of excellent moments. It lacks the incredible awesomeness of the first, but still is pretty dang good.