YMMV / Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Reborn, especially since the duels with them are pretty much a Luck-Based Mission. Shadowtroopers are even worse, adding insane durability to the equation.
  • Rodian snipers, particularly on high difficulties when they can kill you in a few hits (with near-100% accuracy and able to fire multiple shots at a time, no less).
• Even Better Sequel: Jedi Outcast is considered to be the best in the Dark Forces Saga due to the improvements in the Lightsaber and Force mechanics.
• Game-Breaker: The force speed power, which has the net effect of slowing the rest of the world down. With nothing but max-level force speed and a lightsaber, the final battle with Desann can be ended in less than ten seconds without him ever landing a blow.
• Goddamned Bats: The mine crabs on Artus Prime can be very annoying. Lampshaded by Kyle.
  How many of these things are there?
  (wearily) I thought I'd seen the last of these things...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Stealth-Based Mission in the Cairn Docks. It comes out of nowhere, where Kyle suddenly decides to hide from enemies that by this stage he could easily dispatch with his lightsaber and force powers. If nearby stormtroopers spot Kyle they'll instantly run to the nearby alarm panel, resulting in a Non-Standard Game Over, and sometimes they glitch out.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Stun Rod from the first couple of levels. It's a nigh-useless Emergency Weapon that only exists to fill the lightsaber slot. Given the amount of ammo available from Stormtroopers, it will never see use by most players, and it vanishes forever once you get your saber back. Its only possible niche use is in dealing with mine crabs, since it's more consistent in hitting them at close range than your blasters, but that comes at the cost of taking longer to kill them (they die in two shots from the E-11, but the stun rod takes three hits).
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: In spite of the buffing of several weapons, the game is much harder than Jedi Knight. It doesn't help that health and shield pickups are rarer, hitbox detection is flawed, Mooks appear in greater numbers, shields are capped at 100 instead of 200, and there are several Guide Dang It! moments.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The cutscene duel between Desann and Luke is not pre-scripted but plays out in real time. This means that it is randomised every time it plays, and can result in hilarious situations where one of them gets their limbs cut off but continues to fight.
  • The game was one of the first to offer the option of volumetric shadows, allowing for shadows more advanced than the then-typical circular patch underneath character models before games like Doom³ and Half-Life 2 actively pushed graphics further ahead. Naturally, because it was one of the first, it wasn't very future-proofed — id Tech 3 simply doesn't handle light sources that affect these sorts of shadows the same way more recent games do, so while they worked passably on period hardware, anything more recent will invariably end up with the shadows doing whatever they please.
• Stoic Woobie: Jan is seemingly killed in the fifth level. Much later, you find out she's still alive and being held prisoner on the Doomgiver and being subject to Cold-Blooded Torture. Despite this, she never squeals and doesn't seem much worse for wear when you rescue her.
• That One Boss:
  • Tavion is insanely hard to beat, mostly because every once in a while she likes to perform an unblockable combo that kills you. In other words, whenever she resorts to that particular trick, you're screwed. Also, if you try to use Force Speed on her, she'll cast it herself, essentially negating the effect.
  • Desann. Not only does he have his own unique saber style that does as much damage as the Strong style (killing you in just 2 or 3 hits on medium difficulty) and is as fast as the Medium style, but his Force powers are insanely stronger than any other NPC in the series, most notably his nearly unbreakable Force Choke. Justified because he's empowered himself at the Valley of the Jedi; in the previous game, it was the villain's whole plan to do the same thing in order to become invincible and take over the galaxy.
• That One Level:
  • Nar Shaddaa is the first level after you get the lightsaber back. Does it present you with Stormtroopers to let loose on? Nope – it's crawling with Rodian snipers that can kill you in one hit if they want to and they all have Improbable Aiming Skills and nigh-instant reaction times, firing at you as soon as you pass by even the tiniest window. Plus, most of them are well out of range for any other weapon than your own sniper rifle, which you need to charge up to deal anything more than Scratch Damage and hope they don't shoot first. And as ketchup in the cabbage soup there's the preponderance of bottomless pits and walkways with no railings.
  • Cairn Reactor is filled to the brim with tricky platforming sections over and around engineering hazards that will kill you instantly if you fall into them.
  • Following Cairn Reactor is the infamous Stealth-Based Mission on Cairn Dock. Once Imperial troops spot you, they'll either do one of two things: attack you or run straight for the alarm panel. If they get to the alarm panel, it's an immediate Non-Standard Game Over showing Kyle get captured and tortured. Some of the troops and alarm panels are in really difficult-to-spot locations, especially at the very end of the stealth segment, where even entering the room causes you to be seen immediately if you don't climb into the Air-Vent Passageway above, disable the power, and use the Jedi Mind Trick on several of the soldiers in the room. The game's mechanics are in no way suited for stealth, making this an exercise in frustration. Prepare to do a lot of Save Scumming.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Aspyr ported the PC version to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in 2019. While singleplayer is perfectly playable (aside from the lack of rebindable keys), multiplayer on the other hand is completely removed, bots and all. Even the old Nintendo GameCube version allows for offline multiplayer with bots. In response to the criticism, Aspyr readded multiplayer and rebindable keys to their Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy port.

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