Missed opportunity.
* All the right music
* Good voice-acting
* Cut Scenes fitting to the franchise
* Pick-up-and-Play friendly
Minus:
* No penalty for just holding fire from start to finish
* Graphics range from great to simplistic
* Collisions are irritating
* Story is a little difficult to follow due to jumping between characters
* Ridiculous difficulty spike at the end
Space Pilot games is one genre the PS2 doesn't have a straining library of. So one would hope that the few there are, are worth playing. Judging by the Gamespot scores and player reactions the Star Trek games are not (though i have not personally verified this). "Jedi Starfighter" though just about scrapes by.
The game is set in the prequel trilogy era and is split into 3 acts totalling 15 missions including both space conquests and planetary air battles. Typically there are a variety of types involving blowing stuff up, escorting capital ships, blowing more stuff up, protecting ground forces and blowing stuff up.
The two starships you're provided with differ only externally and in the types of special weapons they carry, otherwise they feel the same.
Each ship has four different weapons, and each has two which are useless.
On medium difficulty you'll breeze through Act's 1 and 2 with barely a care. You start the game, hold the fire button and then finish the second act a few hours later. Then halfway through Act 3 you hit a sudden difficulty spike. There's no gradual build-up to it either, it's easy-easy-easy-fail. Like one of the developers put his hand up in a meeting and said "I think the game might be a bit easy" and following on from that they did mission 15 which is blinkin'ard.
The missions also suffer from a lack of freedom, your target sets are announced in sequence to be destroyed rather than you selecting them at your own will. This makes the tougher missions rather tedious because if you fail you can't try a different approach in the next attempt.
Enemy AI is another area where not much effort has been made, your foes either fly around in circles, or fly straight at you. Their avoidance is non-existent so they'll often just fly into you or whatever you're supposed to be protecting. This is especially annoying as in your case it knocks you off-target. I suppose this could be construed as intentional but if it is then it's lazy programming.
There are also collision issues between yours and your allies ships in that you can get yourself trapped between two and ping-pong back and forth.
Some of the missions appear to have been split, they occur at the same time in the same place but end halfway for no particular reason that i can see. I can only surmise that this was done to give the game more missions without actually having to program any.
You will have fun playing it through for the first time, but i had no desire to go back and relive any parts once i'd finished the game. There are various 'completest' things to do, not least beating all the difficulty levels but for me the game ended and so did my compulsion to play.
It actually made me want to go and play a space battle in "Star Wars Battlefront 2" because those are more satisfying.
If you love everything Star Wars then you won't be disappointed with "Jedi Starfighter", and if you're desperate for a space-shooter on the PS2 then this is likely the best bet. If you just want to blow stuff up then there are other games which do it far better than this.