For a first release, this is a pretty good piece of work, albeit quite short. This first level of a series reveals solid architecture and challenging gameplay, but a lackluster atmosphere.

The architecture is great throughout much of the level. Lots of beams and recessed areas in ceilings and walls (and the floors too) wrap a lot of the level. Hallways aren't just the usual long boxes either. Sides of the ceilings are sloped and meet in the middle, and sometimes, the hallways are five or six sided. A good example is a hallway that opens on one side to a seemingly bottomless pit, but preventing the player from going down the pit are a series of X-shaped beams. What I liked most, though, are the doorways. There was a great variety of doorways - wide, narrow, five-sided, a round one, and even combinations of those. Different sizes and differently shaped doorways are a sign of smart design, and this level had a lot of them. However, the doorways weren't flawless, which led to a convenient bug in favor of the player, but more about that later. Although the architecture was well done, the texturing really took away from it. There were misalignments and stitching errors all over the place, the floors being the worst. I wondered if Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder had done the floor work for the Republic. The texture selection in a couple of places (like at the very beginning with the reddish/orange floor) left much to be desired as well, but it was far overshadowed by the stitching and alignment problems.

Enemy placement in "Jedi Master" was well done. Only in one spot was the player up against more than three enemies, but they weren't that hard to take out. You face stormtroopers for the most part and they were usually able to get a shot off at you before you could fire even though most were just standing around. In one place, preparing to exit a duct, the author gives you a peek at the enemies waiting just outside the exit through use of a camera/cutscene. I thought that was well done. Item placement was also pretty decent, making this short level a challenge. At the beginning, you are quite outgunned by some of the railgun-toting stormies against your blastech pistol, and the trooper with the sniper rifle gave me fits. There is a boss at the end too, with a new skin, but he is easy to defeat. There were a few powerups here and there, but not many, which also added to the challenge. Fortunately, the level is short enough and you don't get too desperate for health. Besides the cutscenes, the cogs were scarce: a few doors, elevators, and the dynamically-lit hallways from Force Fire. Aside from the doors and elevators, there's not much movement in the level, making it rather static.

The atmosphere in "Jedi Master" was greatly lacking. At no point did I feel like I was on a Republic ship and there were lots of things that kept me from being immersed in the level. No alarms, no sense of urgency, nothing. The lighting, for example, basically let down the great architecture. It was poor and unnatural. Like on the floor of a hallway, there would be bright spots adjacent to dark spots. Not just one hallway, this was the case throughout the whole level. Some places (like the round doorway) had no lighting at all. Firing shots into the door or activating the saber would not light it up, even though everything around it was relatively lit. In fact, I didn't even know that was a door until about the third time I played through this level. There was a hallway near the beginning that suffered the same fate of darkness. Ambient sounds were practically nonexistent also. Only two or three times did I hear some computer noises in the background, nothing the rest of the time. There should have been some sounds making it appear Imperials were blowing the daylights out of Rebels. Also, instead of having the stormtroopers standing around, more fire fights between the Imps and Rebs (ala level one of MotS) would have been a nice touch. There were a few technical problems as well. There were a couple of HOM (Hall of Mirrors) in the recessed areas of the ceiling near the beginning, and the doors weren't made correctly. If doors are made correctly (by merging the sector the door rests in and the sector the door moves into), enemies cannot see through the door. If you don't do this, enemies will literally "see" right through the door. The dead giveaway is when approaching a door you hear "There she is! Stop her!" (this happened a couple of times) and hear somebody firing into the other side of the door. This is one of the bugs I mentioned earlier. One of the doors where this happens, is supposed to be a locked door. The first two times I played through this, I didn't even know the door was supposed to be locked. When the commander on the other side "saw" me, he shot the door a few times, then proceeded to open it for me. I shot him and ran on through without needing a key. It was later that I discovered that the dark round spot was a door, and that it led to the red key. On the bright side, though, there were no crashes and the only time the framerate dropped a little was in a room full of crates adjacent to the room with the boss.

This short level has some solid playing in it, as well as good architecture. More attention to detail in stitching and aligning the textures, and basically spending more time with the lighting would have really made this a top notch level. If the author spends a little more time with the next installment, this should be a memorable level series.