Well, picked up the box today at EB. Its a little light pen thing with 3 glowing leds in the base making little light tube flash and stuff. I guess its supposed to looks like a lightsaber. Its not a pen though, so I feel slightly cheated. I gather its also supposed to be on a key chain or something, but its a bit heavy for that. So I dunno, I’m not that impressed.
I got a free CD-ROM game with the light pen from the EB guys. It appear to be a tie-in game based off the pen, and so far, that’s a lot more fun to play.
Speaking as someone who despised most of Jedi Outcast, I’m pleasantly surprised by Jedi Academy. The combat feels a bit tighter and more responsive, and the ability to decide which Force powers to develop helps immensely. I also like the mission selection style of gameplay progression. Tired of Tatooine? Hit up Bakura for a mission. The missions also seem to suffer much less from Raven Level Design Syndrome. Very little of the Desperate Switch Hunt crap that plagued JO thus far.
Only problem I’ve noticed is that using Force Push or Pull against enemies on Bakura makes everything grind to a near-halt for several seconds. I’m talking like 2 fps here on a P4 3.06 with RADEON 9700 Pro. Doesn’t seem to me like it should be doing that, although there is a pretty fancy distortion effect that happens when you Push or Pull. Optimization issue? Patch, maybe?
EDIT FOLLOWUP: After a little experimentation, it looks like the chugging is caused by using the Push or Pull when one of the cloaked Imperials is around. The cloak uses the same distortion effect as the Force powers, so apparently that’s just too much for the video card and/or game engine to throw around at once. Is this happening to anyone else or is my system just screwy?
Anyway, a fine job by Raven (at least for the first couple of hours I’ve played). JA is up for Biggest Sequel Improvement for 2004 in my book.
I’ve only tried JA multiplayer so far - Siege mode is pretty fun, but a bit chaotic until you figure out where the hell you’re supposed to go. I thought the Jedi class would be horrendously unbalanced for Siege mode, until I realized Jedi are limited to 50 hps max in that mode, and that one good grenade or tripwire or detpack could nuke them. The vehicles are great, too - nothing like following a teammate’s AT-ST on foot as you assault the Rebel base on Hoth.
Well, after I installed Homeworld 2, it proceeded to scream at me about how my ATI drivers were not up to date. So I fixed that, and have a suspicion that maybe that will help with JA’s little Force hiccup.
I had no idea multiplayer supported vehicles and all that. Gotta try that now.
I’m glad to see some positive impressions, but considering I couldn’t really build up the motivation to even finish the two level demo; this will likley not get much of a look from me. It is possible that I will snag it on Xbox however, it’s not like precise mouse aim really is necessary in these saber duels. Live support with chat is an enticing part of multiplayer as well.
Not only did the driver update fail to fix the chugging problem on Bakura, but it caused the game to start flashing frames of solid colors every time I turned left or right. Only in singleplayer, mind you, not in multiplayer. So to make the singleplayer game playable again, I guess I’ll have to rollback to the previous drivers.
As stated in my impressions of the demo, Force Grip is rather overpowered. There seem to be a lot of “fight the light saber bad guys on the edge of a cliff” situations, which makes it easy to grab people and chuck them off the edge.
I find the light saber combos to be fun. I haven’t needed to wall run yet, but I’ve found that the forward crouch roll stab move works very well at going right under an enemies lightsaber.
Some of the levels are very cool. The “Tram” mission is quite a bit like the original UT’s train assault level. I also liked the “prisoner” mission, because one doesn’t have the light saber, so one learns how to use blasters and the like in conjuction with force powers.
The problem with all the nifty moves though is that with a 3rd person fixed forward perspective and normal movement, is that the battles too easily becomes a move-randomly-around-while-waving the lightsaber things. I almost wish there was another sort of movement mode that resembled a fighting game more, so that one could actually focus on doing cool moves instead of crashing into walls.
But I like the game. I haven’t tried multiplayer yet, but I’m looking forward to the siege mode.
Oh, and the little light pen thing is fun to play with.
I’ve beat this game with both the Saber Staff and the Duel Sabres now and both endings - it’s pretty fun overall.
What Xpav said about the combat near cliffs is true though - the first time I beat the game I almost exclusively killed dark jedi using force grip toss (which is pretty funny to hear them scream) and ended up having a hard time with the final boss battle because of my limited sabre skills (Same thing happened in Jedi Outcast). The second time through I actually tried to fight the dark jedi, so faired better.
I really wish the next Dark Forces game would concentrate more on the blaster weapons instead of the light sabre. Shooting storm troopers in the head is pretty damn fun.
Don’t hold your breath. A lot of people hated the early levels of JKII because they didn’t have a lightsaber. The uproar was loud enough that they will probably avoid doing it again. Too bad…I kind of liked having to do without the force for the first few levels.
I just really enjoyed Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. Moving from regular Han Solo type to a Jedi thoughout the game made it interesting, and the Light Sabre wasn’t that great of a weapon in that game.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked both DF3: JK2 and DF4: JK3: JA - but there really was no reason to ever use anything but the light sabre unless it was a contrived scenario or an AT-ST (hmm I’ll have to kill one of those with a light sabre later).
