Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, known by regular humans just as Jedi Academy, is a shooter that was released back in 2003. Part of a series that originated with the best Star Wars game of all time, it’s being kept alive by mods like Movie Battles, which “lets players play and fight in the most iconic battles seen throughout the entire [Star Wars] saga!”
Movie Battles takes Jedi Academy‘s fairly standard multiplayer — already very good and sadly underrated/forgotten — and juices it up with extra classes, new maps and the ability to play as characters like Han Solo and Boba Fett (including his jetpack).
Jedi Academy was never as ambitious as true multiplayer games like Battlefront, since it was designed primarily as a singleplayer game, but still; the lightsaber combat in these games was fun.
Here’s some video of the mod in action, courtesy of Vongs Yuzzan:
I mean, yeah, it’s still very 2003. You can’t do much to change that. But it’s good 2003, and the attention to detail in the recreation of famous locations like the Death Star hangar is awesome.
You can download the mod here. And the game itself is available on Steam.
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3 responses to “You Can’t Kill A Good Star Wars Game”
I have one very fond memory of this game. I went full dark-side, dark powers and what-not. Discovered that if you drop or holster your lightsaber, Force Lightning would use both hands and double the lightning. It was amazing and a great demonstration of power. Forget using a saber for defense – full offensive or nothing. I would breeze through stages with Stormtrooper corpses flying all around the place. When finally, I reached the stage where you get locked up. Smart guy takes away your lightsabre. Oh that was a fun stage.
I later picked up the game on console, wanting another run at the game when I discovered to my horror that there was no button binding to holster the saber. The only way to make use of the “trick” was to throw the sabre, hide behind something so when it returns to you, it falls to the floor instead. Ruined the game for me.
Never got into multiplayer though.
I remember being able to use two lighting attacks from one hand, standard and life drain.
But I also recall playing it with cheats too, might have been that.
Freaking loved that game.
Yep this would be my favourite Star Wars game.. EVER. I was a few years late to the party (2005/2006) but multiplayer was still pretty cool around then. I loved the light saber duels (and for me light saber fights were the thing that appealed to me in the Star Wars movies).
I knew exactly what game this article was talking about before I even clicked it. And I even knew it would mention the awesome MB2 mod, which I have played steadily for about 8 years now. It never gets old and is, in my opinion, the best Star Wars game to date.
I implore people that have never heard of/played these games to check them out, especially the Movie Battles mod.
Jedi Knight Jedi Outcast is a legendary story and Jedi Academy is really only good because it’s the game Movie Battles 2 is a mod of (I won’t lie, the story is very underwhelming compared to JK:JO, but still worth a play nonetheless if you like JK:JO)
The games are very cheap on Steam and (now, don’t kill me for this) the game doesn’t exactly have any DRM, so if you happened to have inexplicably acquired a copy of the game through internet means, the multiplayer/mods will still work 100℅. You just have to make sure to get the latest patch (When you install the game, it’s on an older patch by default. there is an essential patch that was released over a decade ago that you still need to install), which is as easy as googling Jedi Knight Jedi Academy.
slo-mo dual saber butterfly twirl, switch to concussion rifle, duel on a sky-high speeding train, chased by a rancor, haunting background music
…most satisfying