Despite being a huge fan of Jedi Academy (that game is in my top-10 OAT), I could never bring myself to beat Jedi Outcast, despite the two games sharing 99% of their DNA. I've made multiple attempts, and would always give up at some point. Playing through it this time, it's really become obvious to me why.

Jedi Outcast has easily the worst level design out of all Jedi Knight games, and one of the worst in any game ever. I think about half of the levels are just atrocious.

At first it surprises you with very nice physics and animations, making the battles much more pleasant than before, but then once you kill everybody and start aimlessly wandering around samey-looking corridors, the pleasantness quickly evaporates and the frustration starts growing rapidly. It doesn't help that aesthetically it's so fucking ugly. I had to increase saturation using ReShade because otherwise I had a strong aversion to even launching the game.

An average level in this game goes something like this: You walk into a room, there are 3 doors there, only one of them can be opened. That door leads you to a switch, which is offline. So you run around for like 10 minutes trying to figure out what to do, and then you spot this tiny vent somewhere in a dark corner. You break it open, crawl through it and end up in another room that has several doors, two of which can be opened, and one of them will just be a dead end, and the other one leads you to a switch that will open another door in the first room (and it might not even tell you that it did that), which will then lead you to another switch that will lead you back to the second room, through the third door that will make the original first switch in the first room work, which will then open one of the other doors in the first room.

Yes, it's something like this, I'm not exaggerating.

But traversing these levels is made much more infuriating by the game constantly throwing grenadiers and snipers at you, obviously placed in locations you can't easily reach.

Things only become better in the second half of the game (though there is that one horrible forced-stealth level there). Not only does the level design get more streamlined and tolerable, but also it starts throwing normal enemies at you: mostly stormtroopers and jedi. This is where the game truly shines. The lightsaber combat here (and in Jedi Academy) is fucking amazing. This is the reason why I'm rating this game a 7, there is just NOTHING like it. One hit may be a death sentence, but first you need to break through the opponent's defense, and this can be achieved in various ways. As you progress through the game, you unlock 2 styles of combat (in addition to your default one), accordingly fast+weak and slow+strong. And these genuinely change the way you fight. With the former, you're gonna try and land as many hits as possible while catching your opponent off-guard. With the latter you will want to place that one powerful blow, which has the potential of breaking through the opponent's guard.

You can combine these with the acrobatics this game introduced, which can led to some truly badass kills. For example you can hit your opponent while doing a somersault over them, and if that's a kill, the game will show it in slow-mo from a cinematic angle.

Then of course there are the force powers, which initially suck, but they keep leveling up as you progress through the game, making the second half of the game rather addictive, as you keep telling yourself "just one more level" out of the curiosity for what the force power upgrade is gonna be (I mean, I already knew, but that only made me more eager). Once most of your force powers are level 2, you become a competent fighter, but once they are level 3, you clear out entire rooms of stormtroopers like it's nothing.

Which kinda brings me to another problem with this game. Sure, playing around with helpless stromtroopers is fun, but it's not challenging enough. You really wanna be fighting them jedi. I know that Jedi Academy gives you just that, but here you're still mostly going through regular troops for most of the game.

Honestly though, if I got this game before Jedi Academy, I'd probably spend most of my time battling in the multiplayer (even if with bots). That's where you can really just throw in a bunch of jedi and fight. And just that alone makes it a decent game. You can really throw away the campaign (especially since the story is kinda mid as well).

I think a lot of this game's problems arise from the fact that Raven Software wanted to do an action game (that's what they do best), but were forced to try and maintain the adventurous spirit of the series. This is probably where the confusing level-design comes from, and things like the inventory and bacta tanks. None of this stuff is in Jedi Academy, and it doesn't feel like a lesser experience because of it. Quite the opposite. They should've really embraced the jedi combat and gone all-in on it. As a result this game feels more like a proof of concept for what would eventually become a fully realized experience in Jedi Academy.

Last thing I'll say is that unfortunately most gamers seem to think that Force Unleashed was the first Star Wars game that allowed you to grab enemies and throw them around, but no, it was actually Jedi Outcast. And it's way more fun here because they're much less of a canon fodder, plus the controls are so much better.