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

"Minority opinion: This game needed a little more time in the oven, and will be a disappointment"

Fair warning: this is a long review, and ends with me rating the game 6/10. Since this is likely to be a minority opinion, I wanted to make sure that I explained myself at each step of the way. Also, be advised that I was a huge fan of KOTOR1: I bought both the Xbox and PC copies, and played through and beat the game at least four times between the two platforms. So, I've got a little bit of experience with this. ;-)

With that said, Knights of the Old Republic 2: Sith Lords, is the sequel to what is probably the second-finest RPG for the Xbox ever, and quite possibly one of the top five RPGs ever, Knights of the Old Republic. Are expectations high? The Ebon Hawk herself could scarcely fly higher. Obsidian, the developer, was likely under overwhelming pressure to produce a smash, and... unfortunately... it shows.

The bottom line: this game was released too early, without enough play-testing, and without a thorough editing process.

Is it a bad game? No. Conditionally. Its replayability factor is nowhere close to KOTOR1's, and its weaknesses will probably soon have you flinging your controller at the TV screen. However, its "wow factor" is very high and its opening eight hours are some of the finest gaming you've ever had, so it's a game that could have been insanely great with just a few more months on the stove.

Ah well. To the particulars of the case:

Gameplay: 6/10

The good news... no, the great news: KOTOR2 is KOTOR1, intensified. The same game controls that you're used to are all here, and anyone who's played the first game can jump directly into the second game with virtually no training needed. There are a few new very welcome options, notably the ability to set the aggressiveness stance of your NPCs. Can't tell you how many times the NPCs in the first game would run right through minefields. Doesn't happen here unless you get sloppy. There's also the addition of "forms", which are bonuses and penalties you get when working in specific environments, such as purely defensive, defensive against blasters, attacking against lightsabers, etc. If you want a refresher, the tutorial/prologue is the single most clever intro into a game that I've seen in 20 years of computer gaming. Bravo!

The inventory screen, party selection, journal, inventory screens... all the same as KOTOR1, or similar enough that you can pick it up on the fly. There's also the addition of Workbenches and Lab Stations, and many more items are now upgradeable, notably including most Jedi robes and virtually all armor. Lightsabers have an initially bewildering five upgrade options: two crystals and three components. A little experience, though, will quickly help you along here. Non-used items can be converted into components or chemicals that you can now use to build new items. Good thing, too, because money plays a very minimal role in KOTOR2. Items are much more valuable than money in this game.

The bad news: this game is as buggy as a New York apartment. As I write this, the game's only been out three weeks, and there are already dozens of exploits and glitches. These include exploits for infinite money, experience, and Light Side points. There's almost certainly going to have to be a patch for the Xbox version of this game to address some of these problems, and I doubt the patch will be able to do much more than limit the damage. You'll also encounter at least one major bug -- which varies -- from game to game. I got inadvertently dumped into an area that there was no escape from, and there was no choice but to fall back to an earlier saved game and avoid the mistake. This happened only because (I found out later) I chose an option in the game later than the game expected me to choose that option. Save your game into at least five slots, then vary the slot you're using to include all five. You'll thank me for suggesting this later.

In addition, there are also dozens of unbalancing factors which ultimately will reduce your enjoyment of the game. Put simply: the game's fights are too easy because the game is incredibly generous with stat increases and bonuses. Part of this stems from good news: KOTOR's Level 20 limit is history! As a result, you'll probably finish the game somewhere between level 25 and 35. That, however, means that you'll have many more Vitality and Force points, more attribute and skill points, more feats, and more Force powers than you could dream of in the first game. Added to this is the fact that with all the new item upgrades, dozens of them have attribute increases that will soon push many (if not all) of your attributes into the high 20s, with corresponding +7, +8, or +9 bonuses.

These factors combine with some specialized Force regenerating forms, prestige classes, and items to give your Force powers overwhelming impact with almost zero cost. Light Sider Jedi will eventually find themselves able to fling Force Wave (or even Force Storm) dozens of times in a row without any danger of running out of Force Points. This greatly reduces replayability since, when you can have most of the Light Side AND Dark Side Force powers with one play through the game, why do you need to play it again? It also reduces the difficulty factor because you'll have a very easy time routing even a dozen strong opponents at once. Finally, it reduces the "wow factor" of the game because your lightsabers will become blaster-bolt deflecting props while you Force Wave-Force Wave-Death Field-Force Storm through each room.

It's ironic, therefore, that your growing sense of invincibility is punctuated, fairly frequently, by the requirement to take control of one or more of your party's other characters, leaving your main character behind. These sequences therefore become much more challenging than running your main character. Sometimes, this does a good job of breaking up the momentum the game's story builds up (see Story, below). The rest of the time, it's honestly just a distraction, though playing these ancillary characters is probably the most challenging part of the game. In one case, the only way I could figure out to keep one of the ancillary characters alive was to cheat outrageously... and the game let me do it.

Graphics: 7/10

Lots of good here, balanced by some bad. The first thing that you pick up is the increased detail, particularly in the backgrounds. The 3D models to me look exactly like the first game -- more on that in a second -- which gave you more time to look at backgrounds, which were sharp, clear, and detailed. They were so detailed, in fact, that at several points, just scrolling around the character looking at the background caused some frame rate issues. I'm not sure the extra detail was worth that. ;-)

Frame rate issues become a serious problem later in many of the larger battle sequences, particularly if the adversaries you are facing had a lot of options. As a result, some of the more elaborate combat moves tended to happen in slow motion. However, due to the emphasis on Force powers in this game, by the time battles become truly massive, you'll probably Force Wave, Force Storm, or Death Field your way through 10 or 12 enemies at a time. So, it actually becomes less of an issue in the late game unless you feel the need to prove your competence with the lightsaber.

Several of the environments from KOTOR1 were borrowed and inserted (with minor changes here and there) into this game. The good news is that you'll be interested in the differences over the five year in-game span between KOTOR1 and KOTOR2. The bad news is that KOTOR1-experienced players will tend to know the right places to go in these duplicated environments. Overall, I think this is a slight positive. The Ebon Hawk in particular is back, and has never looked better.

Something that I found slightly off-putting is the fact that many of the face models from the first game were "borrowed" for this game, though placed on different characters from the first game. It was just a bit odd to see the face of a gangster from the first game on a farmer, a Jedi's face on a pazaak player, or a shop-keeper's face on an enemy. On a slightly similar note, something a little disturbing: virtually every NPC you interact with is either an alien or a white male. There were few brown or Asian faces and few non-alien females. The only three non-alien females that spring to mind as a write this, in fact, were 1) a receptionist, 2) a queen, and 3) an important corpse.

Sound: 9/10

Good stuff. The John Williams score is used throughout, but it's varied in pleasing ways, and there's some new music that sounds as if it could have been written by John Williams (and for all I know, might have been -- I didn't check), which is even better. There's only one down note (::grins::) to the music, and that's the theme when your character receives Dark Side points. The theme here is melodramatically loud and brash. Something more subtle would have been better, particularly for a noise Dark Side players are going to hear dozens of times and in a game where the Dark Side is supposed to be operating in a more subtle way than in the first game.

Game sound effects are terrific, and are actually better than the first game. In particular, sounds are a bit more subtle but are still quite audible and quite nice. Environmental sound is also respected: activate a lightsaber in a echoing hall and the sound echoes around the room in a quite realistic manner (try it in the Audience Chamber in the training area on Telos -- you'll know the one I mean when you get there). Weather effect sound is also pretty good, and interlocks well with the graphics.

The voice acting is terrific with a few of the same voice actors from the first game returning in their own roles... and interestingly, a few of the same ancillary voice actors returning in different roles.

Story: 4/10

Moderate spoilers within! Skip to the next section if you don't want to be spoiled.

Like many other reviewers, I noted a very distinct "forward-lean" on the KOTOR2 story: the beginning of the story is much stronger than the middle, which is much stronger than the endgame. As a matter of fact, I'd venture the opinion that the first ten hours of the KOTOR2 story is some of the strongest role-playing story ever done. You play "the Exile," whom the Sith believe is the last of the Jedi. As it turns out, they're dead wrong: there are several other Jedi floating around, but the Sith think that you're the last one and they attempt to hunt you down. This first section of the game is loaded down with atmosphere, has great personalities, great mysteries, and flows well from start to finish.

The early game flows from a mining facility on Peragus to the planet Telos, which you might remember is Carth Onasi's homeworld from the first game. Telos is being rebuilt after the wars and as a result, there are three specific areas on Telos. Once you leave Telos, there are (much like the first game) four planets to explore: Korriban (short), Dantooine (short-ish), Onderon (long), and Nar Shaadaa (really long!). The game subtly influences you to visit Dantooine, then Nar Shaadaa, and it's here in the mid-game that the story really starts to break down.

Like the Gameplay section, it's clear here that the game was released before it was ready. Like a movie that was edited and cut together in a hurry, there are hordes of continuity glitches and entire schools of red herrings swimming by. It's obvious that the people doing the cinematics didn't coordinate with the people writing in-game dialogue and as such, there are breakdowns and dropped threads all over the place. In addition, there are so many NPCs in the game that half of them get either lost in the shuffle, resurrected(!), or both. You can't seem to kill anyone in this game without them getting up, dusting themselves off, and coming at you again later in the game. Throughout the game, your droids have conversations with each other... conversations that are never followed up in the game. Right to the game's very end cinematics, this happens.

Either some plot points and quests got dropped to cut down the size of the game, these are pointers to some forthcoming expansion packs, both... or the story designers got really, really sloppy. Since I haven't heard word about any expansions, I'm unfortunately left with the "sloppy" explanation.

Then you get into the Onderon-Korriban-back to Dantooine middle-to-late game. By this time (and probably before), the game develops a terrible case of Matrix disease. Nobody ever stops to explain the game's backstory: instead, cryptic turns of phrase are substituted for real story, real dialogue. The writers are clearly making it clear that they are WAY smarter than you, and the dialogue becomes so cryptic, you find yourself saying, "yeah yeah, get to the next fight scene, already." By the time you get enough puzzle pieces to start to put a picture together, the game's combat-heavy motif has ironically deadened you to any subtlety whatsoever.

This links with the game's emphasis on combat, combat, combat. Puzzles, conversations, and side quests take a far back seat to just hacking or Force-powering your way through the mass. This will be a disappointment to many fans of the first game who found KOTOR1's puzzles and non-combat challenges to be half the fun. There's only one puzzle area that will slow anyone down in this game, and the solution to that puzzle turns out to be a severe disappointment.

By the end of the game, whether you're playing Light or Dark Side, you'll be playing "Hulk Smash!" No matter how much fun you might have had up to this point, you will rush through the game's two final sequences, just trying to get the game DONE already. As noted in Gameplay, you often switch to ancillary characters, and two of these switches happen right at the endgame, shattering your endgame momentum. You may well shriek "Nooooooooo!" and hurl an object at your Xbox in a rage at this point. Try to resist: as long as you've been thorough up to this point, both of these switches are very short ones, and then you'll be back in your main character for two more fights. The game's final conflicts are anti-climactic to say the least.

Finally, the game's "surprise twist" is no surprise at all. It's so clear in this game who's in your camp and who's not that you'll find yourself unequipping un-used or un-trusted members of your party and "forgetting" to level them up.

Value: Rent or Buy?

Rent or buy used. And damn, does it hurt me to say that. But lacking a multiplayer component, the single-player scenario is what it's all about. Since the single-player scenario will only take you 30-35 hours, and since Blockbuster is no longer charging late fees (::grins::), renting this title and then waiting a year or so until it's a "Platinum Series" title or until you can get it used on the cheap is your best bet. I suspect the price of this game is going to drop rapidly, so you might not have to wait very long. Waiting might also net you a copy of the DVD without the bugs, glitches, and exploits.

7/10 - 1/10 (for being really buggy) = 6/10

(For the curious, the finest Xbox RPG ever is Morrowind. Check it out.)

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/05