Well young Padawan, you can thank the force as your wishes have come true and all that was lost has been found in LucasArts’ latest offering, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. Prepare yourself for a dual-bladed force-powered adventure.

At the start of Jedi Academy, you’ll ]customize your character’s appearance. You can choose the sex and race of your character from a roster of races pulled from the Star Wars universe including the Kel Dor, Rodian, Twi'lek, Zabrak and plain-old Humans. Along with customizing your basic physical appearance, you can also tweak your character’s clothing. Although LucasArts claims that there are two thousand different character combinations, you’re actually limited to race, head type, clothing style and color of clothing and none of these choices are terribly impressive.

In Jedi Academy you play the role of Jaden (the name’s the same for male or female characters) a new enlistee into Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy. You arrive with a group of other young Jedi hopefuls who are assigned to Jedi masters upon arrival. As fate would have it you are assigned to "now" Jedi master Kyle Katarn (the main character from previous Star Wars Jedi games) who aims to show you the ways of the Jedi and teach you to resist the evil temptations of the dark side.

The first improvement this game has over Jedi Outcast is that you start out with your very own lightsaber and a limited arsenal of force powers. As you progress through the various missions, you can choose from many more lightside and darkside force powers such as push, pull, heal, speed, lightning and the dreaded "force grip," made popular by Darth Vader as his weapon of choice for choking his opposition.

As far as weapons go, all your favorites are back from Jedi Outcast, including the blaster, wookie bowcaster, sniper weapon, rocket launcher and grenades. Unfortunately, there’s nothing new outside of the two new lightsaber formats. Even though the weaponry is pretty standard fare, let’s get real here…this is a Star Wars game, and we all know that all we care about using is the lightsaber…right?

Jedi Academy eschews the linear style of gameplay favored by most FPS’ by letting you pick the missions from a list, playing them in whatever order you choose. The missions take place across a wide variety of locations including the now famous desert planet of Tatooine and the frozen planet Hoth. The missions offer a wide variety of tasks from rescuing everyone’s favorite wookie Chewbacca to infiltrating a heavily fortified enemy base and killing everything that gets in your way.

While the missions are fairly varied, some of them are quite dull and repetitive. One mission that comes to mind has your ship crash landing with you sent scrounging parts from other ships to get yours up and running again. The place is crawling with giant sandworm creatures that attack when you cross the sand. You can either jump across the pieces of scrap that are spread across the ground, or use your force speed to run out and grab a part and then run back to your spaceship, repeating the procedure four times until you’re ready to blast off again. It’s an unimaginative level to say the least.

While some of the missions are a little repetitive (kill storm trooper, find switch to open door, disarm bomb, etc.) others crank up the fun by letting you jump into an AT-ST and dish out some serious hurt, or allow you to go for a spin on a speeder and race around the landscape. There’s nothing more fun than jumping on a speeder bike and driving it right down the center of a unit of enemy soldiers, mowing them down with your lightsaber as you go.

As it uses the Quake III engine, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy looks basically the same as Jedi Outcast, with many of the player models being the same as those of the previous game. Repetitive models aside, the developers used the Quake III engine to its maximum benefit in other areas, especially the weapons effects. Lightsabers glow brightly and throw colorful sparks when they make contact with other sabers, and look particularly good when slicing through your foes. The player models, while carbon copies of their predecessors, still look great overall, although the animations can be a little stiff. Whether you are indoors or outdoors the graphics are fairly impressive but there’s nothing you haven’t seen before in many other Q3 based games.

The biggest and most obvious improvement in Jedi Academy is the multiplayer game.Not only have the new lightsaber types been added (dual sabers and the double bladed saber) there are also some new game-modes and combo moves. The new moves that you can pull off are nothing short of amazing. You can run up walls Matrix-style, then back flip off to "hopefully" land behind your opponent and strike him down from behind. The new combo moves are different for each saber type you choose, for instance if you use the duel sabers and press fire/alt fire/crouch the sabers will levitate above your head and start circling. If your opponent moves in close enough, the sabers won’t leave much of him behind for the coroner to identify.

With the new acrobatics and combo moves, the multiplayer matches will make you feel as though you are playing out one of the big "showdown with the evil sith" scenes that the Star Wars movies are famous for. It’s sometimes as much fun to watch a match as it is to play one.

The typical multiplayer modes, including CTF, Free for All, Team Free for All and Duel are all available in Jedi Academy, along with a few new ones. One of the new modes, Power Duel, pits one player against two assailants. If you’re killed, you’re out of the game, and the two remaining players advance to the next round and are teamed up for the following match. Siege, a new team game type, has players trying to capture and hold various objectives. There are several different player classes to choose from, including Jedi, heavy weapons, tech, scout and demolitions, each with their own weapons and abilities. Siege also gives players access to speeders, AT-STs and stationary weapons. If you like class-based team gameplay, the Siege mode will be right up your alley.

As is standard with any LucasArts produced Star Wars title, the music and sound effects are second to none. From the humming of lightsabers to the booming explosions, everything is crisp and clean. Of course, no Star Wars game would be complete without the great theme songs that we all know and love. The sounds of battle mixed with the orchestrated soundtrack will make you wish you could crank your sound system’s volume to 11.

Wrapping it all up, Jedi Academy is an excellent addition to the Star Wars gaming franchise. Although the single player game may get a little slow and repetitive, true Star Wars junkies will most likely enjoy the majority of missions. The new lightsabers improve the gameplay quite a bit, and the multiplayer mode really shows how fun a game can be when developers take the time to put some real work into it.

If you are a Jedi wanna-be who wants to show off your lightsaber skills online, this game is a must have. Just make sure you are strong with the force and beware of the dark side.

See more screens on the Star Wars Jedii Knight: Jedi Academy media page