Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

"You can choose your path, but only on Sundays."

Perhaps most Star Wars fans wouldn't agree with me, but I feel like there isn't anything special about this game. Ok, the ads say that you can choose between the strong dark side or the friendly light side, but not even that is completely true in the game.

Once you start playing you may have some fun, but only for a couple minutes. You are first taught how to perform basic operation, but when performing them you will notice the first flaw of the game: the camera. You can generally control (and adjust) it by using your mouse, but that would imply you to be doing it ALL the time, and that sure becomes boring.

You start the game by getting out of a tube in which your character was being healed, and as you advance (in experience and, therefore, in achieving higher levels) in the level you will meet other characters, who will help you in several tasks, which first include reaching a certain point or unlocking a specific door so that you can travel from point A to B.

Then, you will also have to face several battles. Provided that you have a weapon equipped, you will strike your enemies every X seconds for a very wide range of damage. I've seen a single weapon causing 1 damage once, and a second later causing 20 damage to that same enemy. Perhaps this could differ based on the weapon which you are currently using, but since I've tried it by wielding a weapon which was supposed to cause 1-10 damage, I doubt it. And all the battles are just this! You strike, wait X seconds and strike again, and it appears that the enemies play the same way!

Well, there are also items in this game, which you can use ALMOST anywhere/everywhere you like, but if you try to use them during a battle you won't be fully able to. Why? Because... even if not noticed in the game itself, the game has "turns", and you can only use one item per turn. How do you know if one passed? I haven't got the slightest idea. I should also say that you have many items that you can equip at your free will.

About what I considered to be the main subject, you can choose your path in the game, BUT ONLY SOMETIMES, as most of the times you are just asked something, and depending on how you do on that sequence you will win light or dark points. Unlike in "Jedi Knight", here you can't kill random people or really make your decisions. As an example, during the game I tried to have an enemy lower a price of a thing (using the Force), but neither did he do it nor I could kill him, as I may have wanted.

Concerning quests, at first you will only have one at a time and they will include things like unlocking doors, but farther in the game you may have more than one, and they will be very different from each other.

However, one of the most important things in this game seem to be your party. You seem to be able to have more than 3 characters on your party at each same time, and many different ones, each one with their own skills and stats. Imagine, you can even have droids on your party! Plus, they try to help you on battles, but apart from that they only follow you, not helping at all in the adventure unless it is a pre-determined video or something they were initially supposed to do.

There is also a log in which you will store your quests, and that's a frequent thing in this type of game, but in this game we hear in the tutorial that it was also supposed to tell you where you should go next, which isn't true. So, sometimes you will have to hang across the scenario as a crazy cockroach because you don't know where you are supposed to go next.

Appears that this game also has some mini-games, and the few ones I've seen appear to be quite interesting, and they include playing cards for someone's life or having to shoot a laser battery at some droids to stop them from invading your ship.

Talking now about the graphics, they may be great or not so good, depending on the graphics card you have on your computer. However, generally they are good, you won't see all the pixels floating around the screen like what happened in the older Star Wars games, but they sometimes have some minor glitches, like when you get stuck in a certain point of the scenario for around 5 seconds.

About the sound, I have to admit it is quite good to hear the voices from all those alien species you face across the game, but the same can't be said about the music. Strangely it seemed to me that some tunes were taken from the movies, but I can't be sure. However, they are constantly being repeated, turning them into more monotonous than they should have been.

Truly, I guess that most people would enjoy this game, but only for less than 5 hours. It then becomes boring and doesn't have make feel like you want to keep on playing.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/05, Updated 07/27/05