You play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice. If this statement peaks your interest even slightly, then drop what you are doing and go get this game. It isn’t perfect, but it’s the best Jedi action in a game to date and the story helps fill in the gap between the new and old trilogies.

To best describe this title, you would need  to take the gameplay from the last Jedi Knight game and put it on crack. Nearly all the moves are the same, but far more extreme. Instead of picking guys up and tossing them around, you fling them across the level at a speed that kills them on impact. If you find the right angle, you can easily throw a guy over a half mile and much more if there is a cliff nearby. Instead of the Force push knocking down a couple of guys here and there, you can actually blow over an entire squad of storm troopers. At it’s most powerful, the Force lightning can hit every guy in the room and even take down a Rancor or an AT-ST. Even your character’s lightsaber technique is totally unique and over the top. The game starts you with some decent powers, but you must earn experience from fighting or finding hidden items to level them up and become truly devastating. Using the Force powers aren’t without their problems, though. The push and lightning will miss when you could have sworn you were looking right at the target and picking up enemies to throw them can be difficult in rooms with a lot of debris lying around. Many times the game will grab the closer item that is near your crosshair rather than the enemy in the distance that is directly in the crosshair. It’s not a big deal since the item you accidentally picked up can easily be tossed at the enemy you wanted to grab, but it’s still a little annoying.

The rest of the game may be awesome, but the story is the main reason to play. The Jedi Knight series, as well as most other Star Wars games, were content to simply be spin-offs with a few cameos from the major characters. This game is basically the reason why thing were the way they were at the beginning of the original trilogy. It leads up to and explains how the rebel alliance began, as well as shows what happened to many of the Jedi that survived Order 66. Since it only follows your character, the game doesn’t have the same epic feel as the movies. Imagine if the movies only followed Luke’s point of view. They would have still been great, but we would have missed many important events. Even considering this, the story has to be one of the best in a Star Wars game yet. It does have the light side and dark side ending, but it is simply a single choice made at the end of the game instead of a build up of all the decisions made throughout the way the Jedi Knight games did. The rest of the game plays the same whichever side you want to be on. Most of the time is spent fighting storm troopers since the emperor isn’t supposed to know about you or slaying natives to a planet that want you dead regardless of your allegiance to either side of the Force. The only downside would be that it is another short game and can be completed in around six hours. There are four difficulties and plenty of secondary objectives to complete that increase replay value, but I still wish the story was longer.

The graphics are amazing. The character models are some of the best I have seen, although your pilot unintentionally has a creepy Joker smile on her face most of the time. The voice acting is spot on and it’s not easy to tell that they aren’t being performed by the original actors and actresses. Each planet has it’s own feel that makes you believe it is a real place. Thanks to their new DMM technology, much of the environment reacts realistically. Trees bend like they would in real life. Metal doors contort just like you would expect when hit with a massive Force push. Wooden doors crack and break depending on where they get hit. It’s a blast trying to break stuff and see what happens. There are a bunch of objects that are unaffected by any kind of physics and cannot be damaged. This is probably due to hardware restrictions or level design, but when I throw an object at a tree and it bends in one level but a tree in the next doesn’t, it take me out of the experience a bit.

This title not only expands on the Star Wars mythology, but let’s you explore explore the dark side in a way that the movies and other games haven’t. Had the controls not been slightly annoying on occasion and the story longer, this could have been one of the greatest games in a long time. As is, I still love it and highly recommend it to any action fans. One more statement to help convince you. In the first level you get to play as Darth Vader; how can you beat that?