Review of Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (1998)
At a time when “add-ons” were not yet DLC, but were translated from English as “expansions”, just six months later, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II received its own additional script.
First calls and history
Starting the passage of this scenario, the leaky budget is immediately noticeable with the naked eye - all FMV cutscenes with real actors have disappeared, and they have been replaced by cut scenes on the game engine, which is why everything is perceived as an amateur modification. It’s as if these are the same additional plots from the first The Witcher, like “Side Effects”, “The Wedding” and others (of the really relatively significant ones, I remember only “The Price of Neutrality”, which reveals Eskel’s backstory). Although I wrote that the scenes from the main game are replete with cheap images and decorations, in comparison with those available here they could really be considered ““a whole new episode”, comments about which I found on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, the cutscenes aren't far off in quality from other games that came out at the time (for example,Baldur's Gate, which came out the same year, looks downright scary by today's standards given all the love I have for it), but they inevitably pale in comparison to the main game, which makes it clear WHAT could have been.
All this is clearly wasted potential, because, despite the fact that the story again lacks stars from the sky, the situations in which the heroes find themselves are at least a little curious and a little more ambitious, and I would be glad to look at them rather than at Bok’s antics. The plot begins 5 years after the original, the canon (obviously) is the ending with the victory over Jerec: Kyle is training Mara, his student, a Force-sensitive former minion of Palpatine who has gone over to the Light Side, when suddenly the Imperials attack the New Republic base. Yes, now there are two main characters - the same Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade.One recaptures a base from the Imperials, while the other runs on behalf of the New Republic.
The story with Mara is generally interesting. Her character itself is simply more interesting than Kyle: there is her ambiguity due to the change of side, and her stylish purple lightsaber (even before Samuel L. Jackson and his Mace Windu), and her situational comments not only during cut scenes, but also during the gameplay. If you turn to the Internet and study the issue in more detail, it turns out that in the old Star Wars canon she was the wife of Luke Skywalker, who bore him a son, Ben, whose last mission from Darth Sidious was to kill Luke. And at the photo shoot for Star Wars gaming cards, she was performed by the charming model Shannon McRandle, whose appearance was used as a reference for Jade's subsequent performances.
What happened to the game?
Thanks to the introduction of a second character and the conditional division of the game into two parts: for Kyle and for Jade, the developers were able to add a greater variety of locations and opponents, even in comparison with the main game, in which I already praised this after the rather meager original Dark Forces. This approach made it possible to implement not only gut stations, but also an imperial town with a large area and several establishments, caves with pirates, a smugglers' lair, an abundance of our favorite underwater sections, an underground stormtrooper base, dark swamps and an ancient Sith temple. They didn’t disappoint in terms of variety of opponents either.Although mostly new enemies are represented only by new skins, however, this is also pleasant in its own way, because now you can meet the stormtroopers-reconnaissance familiar from the films, shadows, new droids, undead Sith, gorillas with blades (I can’t describe it any other way) and even a rancor, just like Luke fought with.
Weapons were no exception. Variations have been added to most of the weapons from the main game: a new blaster, grenades, a rocket launcher and my personal favorite - a sniper rifle, which one-shots almost any enemy and which was sorely missed at long distances. On top of that, I finally tried alternative fire options for almost all the guns, which solved the problems with grenades and explosives, although it didn’t make them any more useful. The only really useful feature is the alternate lightsaber strike, which is only slightly slower than normal, but feels like it deals increased damage, thus one-hit killing most enemies. I generally became more tolerant of the sword in this game and treated it like a classic shooter knife, but on steroids - very awkward and very deadly. The fact that the sword is not required to use until the last levels plays a role here, because in the add-on there are no battles with Sith bosses (with a certain “but” at the end).
But what is mandatory (and this is good) is the use of Force abilities. In the main game, you can count on the fingers of one hand the situations in which it was necessary to use super speed or telekinesis, and “Jedi vision” was needed only as a night vision device at low brightness, not to mention the use of directly items in the inventory (there are such in the game). Here, on the contrary, in almost every mission you need to jump somewhere, pull something, pass somewhere unnoticed, see something using an ability, use an object. This is also helped by the fact that neutral functional abilities are available from the very beginning of the game.Such variety is confusing at first, and out of habit you look for other ways to solve gameplay problems, but over time you realize the benefits of local abilities and are more willing to resort to them both in battle and when exploring locations.
There is a silver lining
Noting the advantages of the add-on, I could continue to praise the design of the missions (there are scripted scenes and bobbleheads that help in combat), the increased variety of game situations (for example, battles in low gravity, a timed escape or a sabotage mission with a chase), but all of them collapse due to its disadvantages, as well as the disadvantages of the game itself. The terrible game design and general crookedness of the gameplay are taken to the absolute level here. I always tend to admit my shortsightedness as a player first, but here I am absolutely sure that it is not me.
I basically try not to read guides or watch walkthroughs of the games I play through, which is why here I ran 3 or 4 times for 10-20 minutes from one end of the map to the other, trying to guess what the developers wanted from me. If the locations of the original seemed confusing to you, then here the authors decided to outdo themselves and reach a qualitatively new level. I haven’t felt as foolish as I did here for a long time, wandering through several corridors, and the constant need to swim or jump somewhere with the local physics completely drove me crazy.
Thankfully, I got used to the combat while playing the main game, but even here the developers outdid themselves by taking away all the weapons except the lightsaber in the last three levels, so that the player would finally understand why the title of the game says “Jedi Knight” (and let me remind you, this is primarily a first-person shooter). I'm keeping quiet about the final boss battle, as well as about the tigers from the temple (one of the few new opponents with new mechanics). The latter caused flashbacks in me, reminiscent of the cazadors fromFallout: New Vegas, looking at which I could not believe that their movements were not an engine glitch or behavior peculiarities on my system. Not a glitch.And there was no glitch here.
At the end, it turns out, after the credits, there is a fan-service scene in which you can use Luke to defeat Boba Fett, Mara and Kyle, and then fall into the same pipe (but with a hand) from the cult scene and land on the Millennium Falcon.
Rating 3/5