Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast

So what happens if you cross Quake 2 with Blade of Darkness in a Star Wars setting. Something that I've played over more than a dozen times in the last ten years. Jedi Outcast is another one of my favourite games, it's expansive, it's fun and it's challenging enough. More than that it has an awesome multi player. 

The game starts at an Imperial outpost, where some mining works are being monitored. You're a Jedi, or at least you used to be one, but you've lost your will to use the force, at some point and abandoned the ways. So the game starts with just you and your partner from a first person perspective, as any normal FPS. Later on you'll be forced to return to the light-saber swinging, but for now enjoy the first few levels - roughly 3-4 hours of game-play as your average FPS. 

The story revolves around the stormtroopers mining some crystals that are used to give the force to ordinary people and turn them into weak-sauce Jedis with barely any training at all, but still there's supposed to be thousands of them by now. So the first levels are at the mine, trying to stop its crystal production, and the latter ones are more towards looking for who's responsible for the whole mess. 

The weapons in the game are a standard mixture of blasters, some grenades, a rocket launcher, a crossbow. The initial blaster that you get has infinite ammo, but it's ineffective against anything other than stormtroopers, and it's only advantage is that it's dead accurate and you can right click to charge it, and snipe someone out of a window if you have to. After you've had your fun doing that, ala Quake 2 or Half-Life, you'll be sent to the cloud city, where some more stuff related to the story happens, your attractive female companion/partner gets abducted, and you finally bring yourself to come to terms with your hate for the force, and go back to the academy, so you can re-train and come back out with your old light-saber. 

The Jedi Academy level, acts as a nice tutorial, although it comes after a good few game-play hours. Later on, the light-sabre will prove to be your most valuable weapon. You can use it to solve puzzles, throw it at enemies over a few yards, or simply chop them up old-fashioned style. Finally the game is pretty epic, some of the levels take place at one of those large triangular Imperial ships you see in the movies. 

And that's about it basically, you run around shooting stormtroopers, or chopping them up. Also some aliens, and some mechanical thing at some point. There's a nice swamp level, where cloaked trooper things attack you from the shadows. And finally you fight some guy named Dessan who looks like a space lizard. There's five difficulty levels if I remember correctly, so you won't have trouble beating the game on Initiate, and you'll have a nice challenge, if you set it on Jedi Master. By now you should have figured out I'm not much of a Star Wars geek, but you don't need that to enjoy this game. It's epic and it's full of puzzles and action in equal proportions.