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Reviews
Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast (2002)
Fantastic game, a great use of the Quake3 engine
The Quake 3 engine is used to excellent effect here by Raven. The game plays excellently, the first levels play nicely, presenting a nicely challenging first person shooter. Once you acquire the lightsabre about a third of the way through the game you begin to increase your force powers and the game, unfortunately, becomes laughably easy. The lightsabre deflects just about every single weapon blast, and simply standing in a corner will often clear a room for you. It's not until the later levels with the appearance of more lightsabre equipped enemies that it becomes more challenging again.
However in Multiplayer the game really begins to shine, it has the standard Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and some specific and unusual game modes. But essentially it's Quake 3 with lightsabres. There is a true 'honour' community amongst players, bowing to each other, not attacking when a guys sabre is deactivated (means I wish to talk) and other such courtesy. I've never had so much fun when fragging.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)
Superb Eye Candy, but a little uninvolved
This game looks fantastic. The flame effects are superb, as is just about everything visual about it. The story is good as well, and it plays excellently, but it all just doesn't seem to work together.
The visuals feel like the main aspect, almost as if the game was made to show them off. The gameplay puts you into good circumstances, but they never seem really challenging. The stealth missions are a nice addition, but Thief did it years ago, and much better. And why oh why did they bother to make the bodies go down stairs? No-One lives Forever managed to get this right, with older technology. They really shouldn't have bothered trying, the end result is worse than it would have been otherwise.
Overall it looks great and I would recommend anyone to play it, but it never really involves you in the game, the story is an excuse to 'run to here, kill all bad guys, collect item, run to here, use item, kill all bad guys' and you never feel part of it, dispensing few and far between enemies with ease.
But when all is said and done, this IS a classic game, and will be praised for years, even though all it's great parts don't seem to make a great whole.