A good follow up to Jedi Outcast

User Rating: 8 | Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy PC

Jedi Academy released in 2003 is a follow up to the excellent Jedi Outcast released the year prior.

You play as a Jedi who is going to Luke Skywalkers training academy to become a Jedi. One of your contemporaries who is also going to the academy on the same space ship unfortunately takes the wrong path and sides with the "dark side" which sets the premise of the story. Without ruining the story too much you are then tasked with going to various planets often with the lead of the Kyle Katan to perform various missions, in hopes of uncovering what has happened to the wayward student tackling various tasks that Luke Skywalker and the other lead Jedi Kyle Katan has set for you.

Unlike in Jedi Outcast, you have the option of choosing which planets you can go to, to perform various missions. You will experience encounters with prominent characters from the Star Wars universe. What makes this game interesting as opposed to it's predecessor is that you have access to light sabers early in the game and later dual light sabers which brings out very interesting light sabre duals.

Graphically, the game starts to show it's age with the modified Quake 3 engine, but still makes use programmable pixel and vertex shaders which was starting to become mainstream with GPUs around this time to make the game look a bit better on the PC as opposed to the consoles.

While this game is not as memorable as say the Jedi Outcast was it's still a descent game in the Star Wars universe which makes it a worthwhile play through as there was a long drought of descent Action Star Wars games over the next decade or so after it's release.