Jedi Academy — the only Star Wars game to make you feel like a Jedi
Something that recent Star Wars games all fail to replicate is that feeling of actually being a Jedi. The new Battlefront games (ignoring their known flaws for a minutes) do a good job of capturing the feel of the films, but sadly if you want to sit down and play a game that lets you fight people with a lightsaber and use the force like a Jedi, they — like Force Unleashed before it — aren’t really up to scratch. The last game to really capture this feeling was Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.
The game puts you in the shoes of Jaden Korr, an apprentice on their way to study at Luke Skywalker’s academy on Yavin VI. Kyle Katarn, of Dark Forces and Jedi Knight fame, is your master. You have to go on various missions as you develop your powers, and ultimately (as is to be expected in Star Wars) fight a dark Jedi trying to take over the galaxy.
The story isn’t the best, especially when compared to other Lucasarts games like Jedi Outcast (the previous entry in the series before Academy), and the Knights of the Old Republic series. It does have it’s moments, but the best thing about the single player is the lightsaber combat. There hasn’t been anything since Academy to match it.
For me though, it wasn’t the single player that made the game so good, or captured that feeling of being a Jedi. It was the multiplayer.
A life of its own
I remember booting up multiplayer for the first time and seeing only a handful of servers. I played around these for a bit, enjoying the battles and discussions with other players. It wasn’t until I realised I was running an unpatched version of the game that things changed — after downloading the patch, there were countless servers listed running all manner of game modes, maps and mods.
In an instant, I could join a server running a mod that made the game more of an RPG (currency and all) than a shooter/lightsaber fighting game. Others added classes (encouraging even more RPG-like gameplay), and yet more tidied up the game and made it more user friendly.
Then there were the maps and character models.
When you played multiplayer you could be any figure from Star Wars and go anywhere. I spent hours on a map based around a Tatooine cantina, as well as the various incarnations of the ‘Jedi’s Home’ map (shown below). The whole Star Wars universe was at your fingertips, in a game that ran smoothly and was fun to play.
Memories of a community
Looking back, I was without a doubt one of those kids I find annoying when I play Overwatch. I spent a lot of time winding people up on their RPG servers — interrupting story lines or generally getting kicked and banned. Still, it was a huge amount of fun and there hasn’t really been a community that I’ve been involved with in the same way since. I even tried my hand at making maps (I was never very good) and running my own Forcemod 3 server.
Those days of browsing jk3files.net and pcgamemods for the latest maps and mods are gone, but you can still get the game on Xbox One backwards compatibility (it was free with Games with Gold earlier this year). I’ve played the single player through again, and though I’ve enjoyed it, it just makes me miss the multiplayer. It brought back memories of when I first started playing it with my best friend—he still had dial up internet so we had to coordinate at school when we’d be online.
We also worked out that you could take the disc out of a PC running the game after a multiplayer match had begun, which meant we had LAN parties all running off one copy of the game. We would all join a server with other players online, or fight against each other in one of the other multiplayer modes.
Last time I booted the game up to play multiplayer (it’s on Steam too), what servers still existed were largely filled with bots, trying to fool players into thinking there were other human players around. It was a bit of a ghost town, and a sad demise for what was once a thriving community.
I hope that more people can enjoy the game again now its available on Xbox One, but it won’t bring the multiplayer, or the modding, back. While there are other gaming communities I’ve been part of (Halo, Overwatch, Dark Souls being the biggest), none are as significant to me as Academy’s. That is, until EA finally make a game that captures that feeling of being a Jedi that has been missing since before Force Unleashed.
