STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy™

Jogasso

Star Wars has felt really conservative in the years following the Disney buyout. Not to say that the prequel era was perfect but its expansion of the lore via legends and a mindset that encouraged fans to explore their wildest fantasies is what allowed games like Jedi Academy to exist. Jedi academy takes the aesthetics and design language from the prequel era and applies it to the post battle of Endor world of the original trilogy. This combination that has been pretty much exclusive to Star Wars media of that time makes its atmosphere feel nostalgic yet fresh. The game holds nothing back as you train with Luke and get to use dark side abilities while molding your Jedi anyway you wish. Depending on your usage of dark side powers the last two levels play out differently which was a great idea. The combat/controls feel amazing and the game doesn’t hold your hand at all which is something I can appreciate. However this leads to some frustrating moments towards the end that leaves the game feeling dragged out. There is an impressive amount of tech you’ll need to learn in order to make it past the last few levels which have a massive difficulty spike. This spike felt really jarring considering that the game was very easy up until the last 4 or so missions. The levels were also pretty short with the majority of them being less than 15 minutes each up until those last few. There is also a surprising amount of level variety with interesting objectives. Some of it works well and some of it is pretty awful but they are usually short missions so I still ended up appreciating what they were trying to do. There are a fair amount of things I could pick apart with some of the level design and narrative, but it’s one of those games that has its core gameplay so polished that it doesn’t really feel worth complaining about. This is a game I wish I knew about growing up I’d highly recommend to anyone that’s into Star Wars. 8/10