GB Feature: Jade Empire: SE Review & More

Along with a three-page review of BioWare’s recently released Jade Empire: Special Edition, we’ve made a handful of tweaks to our Jade Empire subsite to reflect some of the changes introduced in the PC version. We’ll be adding a lot more in the coming days, but for now we’ve posted details for the Demon Staff, Demon Sword, Rhino Demon, Iron Palm, and Viper combat styles, seventy-six high resolution (2560×1600) screenshots, six new wallpapers, several new pieces of concept art, a handful of new art renders, and more. A snip from our review:

…there are also numerous quests to complete in Jade Empire, both of the required and optional variety. The game introduces you to the concept of (Open Palm) versus (Closed Fist,) which is its way of handling alignment (Open Palm is basically good while Closed Fist is basically evil), and so you’re given some options for how to deal with people and how to solve certain quests. The quests work well enough, but I felt like I had seen a lot of them before. For example, there’s an arena that you can fight in, there are bounties to collect where the criminals being hunted aren’t necessarily as evil as they’re being portrayed, and you’ll find a person being framed for a crime and have to clear his name.

More unique is the mini-game in Jade Empire. The technology level of the empire includes gunpowder, and that allows for lots of odd contraptions, including flying vehicles. At various points in the campaign you have to fly between places (that’s how you move between cities), and, of course, if you have a flying vehicle then the bad guys have them, too, and way more of them, and you have to shoot them down. This results in a scrolling shoot-em-up mini-game similar to the old arcade game 1942. I enjoyed this mini-game more than, say, swoop racing, and it has the benefit that most of the flights are optional, and so you can take it or leave it.