Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Unless you're nostalgic or curious about older Star Wars games, stay away from this.

First of all, the Steam version has horrendous compatibility issues with modern PCs and needs some workarounds.
Next, the game simply isn't very good. As a shooter it's tolerable, but once you switch to lightsaber combat it becomes terrible. The lightsaber mechanics are clunky and nothing like the fun combat from Jedi Outcast or Academy. Even worse, using the lightsaber becomes mandatory in later levels, where enemies that can kill you with one or two hits are thrown at you, making the game incredibly frustrating. I would recommend simply skipping this one (Dark Forces II isn't that great either) and playing Jedi Outcast instead.

This expansion slowly gets worse with every level. Right away at the beginning of the game you start with a lightsaber and force powers...but not useful force powers. Just like in the previous game the lightsaber is not...useful at all, and the really good force powers are not available to you at the start. It's extremely unclear when you get access to these powers. Anyway the game peaks with the second level and everything after that is just a slow descent into mediocrity. I do enjoy the design of the second level. The first few level playing as Mara are decent, but then you're forced to battle a rancor and it just kills you over and over. After that the next few levels are again decent enough, though some of the puzzles are incredibly cryptic. There is this one part where you have to dodge these fan blades, and I have no idea how you're supposed to do that. Like seriously I have no idea at all. I just got lucky.

And then! Oh dear lord. You get this swamp level. It has an impressive atmosphere for a game made in the mid-90s. There's thunder and lightning and it's very creepy. Everything else about this level sucks. It's been quite some time since I've played a game where I got stuck on a level in the first few seconds, but that's what happened here. At the beginning of this level there's this statue that blocks your way. You have to use a specific force power to get by the statue. I tried using all my force powers, but none of them worked. I spent over 15 minutes just in this one tiny area wondering what the hell I was doing wrong. I eventually figured out that if you walk right up to the statue, it drains your force power, and there's no indication that it does that. I waited a few seconds for my force power to regenerate, but still, nothing happened. I don't like using a guide but I had to use one here. I honestly tried using all my force powers. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I eventually figured out that you have to sit and wait for 30 seconds for your force power to regenerate enough if it's fully depleted. Absolute. Garbage. Absolutely inexcusable for it take so long and this level only gets worse. This entire level is just a giant troll. To start with, your guns don't work; your force power is constantly low because you're using it so much; there's these invisible water traps that are extremely annoying; there's these flying enemies that appear from all directions and frequently get behind you; all the other enemies do ridiculous amounts of damage to you; and somehow the enemies continue to get stronger to the point that they can kill you in mere seconds from full health on medium difficulty.

It's just a mess of a game. If I really wanted to, I could probably beat this game eventually, but the mechanics are just so dated I don't really see a reason to do so.

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith is an expansion for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 which was a sequel to Star Wars: Dark Forces. So Mysteries of the Sith is basically the 3rd game in the (somewhat confusingly-named) series, with Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast succeeding it (and further adding to the confusion).

Mysteries of the Sith is set five years after the events of Jedi Knight. Kyle Katarn is now a Jedi Master with Mara Jade as his apprentice. Initially, you play the first four missions as Katarn, then finish the game's final ten missions as Mara.

As the game begins, Katarn and Mara are inside a Rebel base that comes under heavy attack. Katarn leads the evacuation and must first find a way of destroying the laser-equipped asteroids orbiting the planet in order to clear an escape route. Afterwards, Katarn sets off to find a long lost temple of the ancient Sith, leaving Mara Jade behind. Mara is sent to strike a deal with a Hutt before being sent on a few other errands and later retrieving a stolen Jedi Holocron. Eventually, Mara Jade sets off to find Katarn and must battle through an eerie swamp and venture into the Sith catacombs. There's not really an overall story to it; more like a series of distractions until you find Katarn where he explains why he is there.

In the final few levels, you are unable to use guns so are have to use a combination of your light-sabre and your force powers against the game's toughest enemies. The spike in difficulty and change of play-style is jarring.

You move around using WASD on the keyboard, hold shift to sprint, Z and X to jump and crouch, and the space-bar to interact with switches. Number-keys switch weapons and equip items. Q/E scrolls through Force powers and F uses them. You can save at any point (Quick-Save assigned to F9) which I recommend using frequently.

At the end of each level, you can assign a couple of points to upgrade force powers. I didn't understand the interface here because the columns were labelled “Choose 1”, “Choose 2” etc., yet you could choose more than that, but certain abilities were still disabled and this wasn't clear when they would become available. There's a few offensive force abilities like Chain Lightning and Sabre Throw which the game seems to assume you will get, since the final few levels disable use of guns. Therefore, just like the previous game, it is possible to make the game impossible by your choices of upgrades.

There's a good range of enemies including Gamorrean Guards, Tusken Raiders, Grans, Noghri, Vornskrs, Storm-troopers, and various Sith. There's even a lightsabre-only fight against the massive Rancor. There's plenty of enemies to shoot, but there's also lots of platforming and hitting switches along the way.

The original game (Dark Forces) suffered from many problems in its design. In Jedi Knight, the improvements were drastic. The main advantages were driven by the vastly improved graphics; textures are much better and sharper, meaning switches are much easier to distinguish from walls, although some are still easily missed. Since it's basically an expansion pack, the graphics are similar to Jedi Knight. The FMV sequences are gone, so now the cut-scenes are just rendered using the game's 3D engine.

The design in this game hasn't changed meaning you will end up getting a bit lost, looking for a simple switch or door. There's plenty of levels were progression is made by finding a small grate to slice open and move through the ventilation shafts. These can be fairly easy to miss, and it's not obvious to newcomers that this is even possible. So throwing one in there in the first level is very frustrating.

To me, this game seems just more of the same Dark Forces 2 without improving on it. It still seems to be regarded as cult classic, but for me, it's definitely not a great game.

The Mysteries of the Sith expansion released a year after Jedi Knight is equally worthwhile. It has the same strengths and flaws of the main game, but it’s equally long and ambitious (expansions were a different beast in the ‘90s). Players have the benefit of starting with a lightsaber and basic force powers, which is nice. There isn’t much that puts it apart from the main campaign, and with Half-Life and Sin‘s release, it quickly became forgotten.