STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

I came into this one already knowing it had teeth. A 91 Metacritic from 1997, a campaign where your own behavior determines whether you end up pledging allegiance to Luke Skywalker or sitting on an imperial throne, and a 10-weapon arsenal that includes a Bryar pistol, Wookiee Bowcaster, Imperial Repeater, Rail Detonator, and a lightsaber that doubles as a light source and blaster-bolt deflector. That setup sounds great on paper, and for the most part it delivers. The single-player is a 21-level FPS that opens as a fairly standard corridor shooter, then shifts gears once Kyle Katarn picks up his father's lightsaber around level three. From there, Force powers start accumulating between levels: neutral abilities like Force Speed, Force Jump, and Force Pull sit alongside a full split roster of Light powers (Healing, Persuasion, Blinding, Absorb, Protection) and Dark powers (Grip, Throw, Lightning, Destruction, Deadly Sight). How you invest those stars, and whether you gun down civilians along the way, nudges you toward one of two endings. The moral system is blunt by modern standards, but the build variety it creates across two playthroughs is genuinely interesting, especially if you want to see what Deadly Sight actually does to a room full of stormtroopers. Here is where I have to be straight with you about the age of the thing. Level design is the biggest friction point. Maps are large, open, and often symmetrical in the worst possible way, and without a waypoint system you will occasionally spend twenty minutes running in circles trying to locate a single switch. The lightsaber hit detection is inconsistent enough that early Jedi duels feel like two people waving glow sticks in a mosh pit. And the FMV cutscenes, which were a technical flex in 1997, are deeply campy now, somewhere between a high school drama production and a Star Wars fan film with a real ILM budget. Certain players love them for exactly that reason. Others will skip every one. On the multiplayer side, the structure is Capture the Flag and a deathmatch mode called Jedi Training, supporting up to 32 players online. Your rank at character creation determines Force power access, so a freshly made Initiate is bringing a butter knife to a Jedi Lord fight. The balance problems that reviewers flagged at launch, specifically the chaos that erupts when Force Grip, Force Pull, and high-damage ranged weapons collide in the same space, are real and have never been patched. Active online lobbies in 2025 still exist through the community-maintained OpenJKDF2 source port, which also fixes most of the modern Windows compatibility issues the bare Steam release runs into. If you want to play this without pulling out the forum thread to manually fix crashes, OpenJKDF2 is the route. This is a PC-only release, and the controls assume a keyboard and mouse setup from the dial-up era, though they remap cleanly. At 1080p without a texture mod, the polygon models look exactly as old as they are. The Jedi Knight Remastered mod and upscaled texture packs on Nexus Mods address that if the original visuals are a dealbreaker. For what it is, a late-90s Star Wars FPS that earned its Metacritic score and still has a small but durable community orbiting it, this holds up better than most genre contemporaries from the same year.

Fred · Scout Team

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