Single Player

No Jar Jar in sight

Single player games always boil down to one thing: level design. If the level design doesn’t work, nothing else really matters. In Jedi Outcast you’ll find a lot of the same level designs we’ve been seeing for years – most of the levels boil down to finding your way to a door and killing everything in between. It’s better than it sounds though; since you are in the Star Wars universe the enemies you fight and the environments you’re in are a lot better than your average FPS/Action game. Fighting around Tie-Fighters and having AT-STs waddle towards you is worth the price of admission alone.

Chopped in half

Sit down!

I see your schwartz is as big as mine

You will find a handful of very annoying jumping and “find the air vent” puzzles. I was disappointed to find any of these types of puzzles in this game, since there is so much potential for good puzzles with the force powers. Every single one of the force powers could have been used for an original puzzle, but only a few of them were. I don’t understand why they decided to use the old, worn out puzzles from years ago. Luckily these puzzles don’t show up that often, and there’s plenty of fighting in between them.

It’s hard to judge the weapons in single player, because after I got my hands on the light saber I didn’t use any other weapons. Once in a while you need to snipe with the Tenloss Disruptor Rifle, but that’s only because you run into enemies that are too far away to kill with Force powers or your saber. Even the rocket launcher, a staple in any FPS game, takes a back seat to the light saber. You may think it’s bad that a game focuses so much around a single weapon, but quite the opposite happens here. The light saber is one of the most fun weapons in any game I can think of. Running into a room with a dozen Storm Troopers, deflecting all their shots as you chop them to bits really gets your adrenaline pumping.

Fighting amongst the TIEs

Lose something?

Out in the open

Abuse the Force

Light saber dueling in single player is actually more fun than multiplayer. Why? Because there’s a lot more blocking in single player. When you’re dueling the computer will block your attacks a lot, so you can’t just hack away and expect to win. I like more blocking because it’s more like the movies where touching a light saber is deadly – the only time Vader scored a hit on Luke, Luke lost his hand. Because of all the blocking, single player dueling also feels faster than multiplayer.

Force powers add a lot to the single player game. For example, the Heal force lets you go longer stints without searching for medpacks. I don’t like a lot of reloading when I’m playing single player games, and heal allowed me to get through with very minimal reloading (even on Jedi Knight difficulty). Push and pull allow you to knock enemies over so you can get close to them, as well as knock weapons out of their hands. Force throw lets you chuck your saber at a fleeing enemy, something that always made me laugh. Force powers also bring you into the Star Wars universe since you’re doing the same tricks that you’ve seen in the movies.

The Speed force power is definitely unbalanced in single player - it’s way too strong. The best example is that I beat Desann at the end of the game in all of five seconds. All I did was flip on Speed, run up to him and chop his head off before he could even raise his light saber. With speed you move so fast for so long that every light saber fight is way too easy. They tried to balance it by changing your field of view to a “fish eye” view, but it doesn’t do much. It’s so abusive that you can get through the entire game using only speed and heal (not including the puzzles that require other force powers).