Murdering a bunch of sand people is the path to the light side of the gameplay
This game starts with an unusual, but surprisingly fun premise: After Return of the Jedi, instead of Luke Skywalker vanishing to become a chubby old guy who hates 'doing The Joker' he sets up a Jedi School and trains 'padawans' to rebuild the old days where the Jedi were the defenders of the galaxy. As one of these students this amounts to, at least initially, being a Jedi beat cop solving petty crime throughout the cosmos. You even get promotions after each major story mission. Of course, this eventually opens up into a larger arc about Sith cultists using a magical staff to drain Force Juice from ancient temples. It comes off like bad fan-fiction, probably because it is bad fan-fiction, but I suppose that's a given with former series protagonist Kyle Katarn hovering over your shoulder.
The progression goes in stages. You get a handful of missions you can take in any order, with the final one you choose being optional. Completing any one mission grants you access to a single Force Power upgrade. Afterwards you are sent on a major story mission which always ends with a promotion from Luke that results in all of your 'core' powers being upgraded. The quality of these missions can vary wildly, with the best and most numerous ones sending you on missions to slaughter hundreds of people. There are more mediocre ones involving jumping puzzles and 'exploring' (which is a Star Wars term for boring wandering) and a completely godawful mission in which you drive a speeder bike around and play Lightsaber Road Rash.
The game gives you a ton of weapons, which made sense in the previous games due to Kyle Katarn typically starting out each one as a Han Solo-type before picking up a saber partway through. Here, though, you start out with a lightsaber and it makes little sense to ever use anything but. The lightsaber combat toes an odd line between too simple and too complex. There's no character action style combos, cancelling, or weight to it-- it feels much more like a melee weapon awkwardly swung by a First Person Shooter hero, and yet the way hits are calculated are fully dynamic. Going through Tatooine and gutting hundreds of sand people or storm troopers and 'cutting through them like butter,' as they say, is fun and works well enough. But whenever you're pitted against another lightsaber user it just feels chaotic and random yet also highly lethal. I've played through all the Jedi Knight games and I've never really found a tactic that worked for me in these situations besides holding the mouse button down and quick loading until the dice rolls are favorable. Once the sith guys you fight become tough enough to counteract the benefits of your force powers the game just becomes a bit of a slog and I'd recommend stopping there.
Speaking of the force powers, they come in three groups: Light, Dark, and Core. Core are by far the most useful, including passive buffs, force push/pull, and slow-motion. Unfortunately the core powers only raise in power with your promotions. Since the promotions are doled out by the story progression, and the difficulty curve is tied to this linear story progression, it tends to be a zero-sum game. Light and Dark powers are more mutable, but only a couple of them are actually useful. With your promotions and missions cleared you get a wide arsenal of force powers to use, but your pool of mana-- er, that is, force mana never goes up. While it does regen, by the last third of the game where you're fighting entire rooms of sith lords back-to-back necessitating lots of force-shielding and force-healing, I was consistently tapping the bottom of my energy pool.
Light and Dark powers are available no matter how you play the game. There is no "light path" and "evil path" to unlock them separately and the missions generally force you to decapitate everyone you meet. There's no penalty for attacking innocents, surrendering baddies, or running up and literally stabbing people in the back. This makes for a more fun game, but it strikes a weird contradiction with the source material, especially since Luke will bitch you out for having more Dark Side powers than Light Side ones, but if you have more points in Mind Trick instead of Berserker Rage he'll happily compliment you post-slaughter. Weirdness aside, the game is at its absolute best when you are slaughtering people far less powerful than you are and kind of sucks when you're put up against credible threats.
