One of the greats
When Knights of the Old Republic was announced, it was like a dream come true for Star Wars fans AND RPG fans. The combination of the best North American RPG developer in Bioware and the Star Wars franchise seemed to good to be true.
And the final product is not just good, but great.
KOTOR is a dreamlike middle way mix of a typical american RPG like Bioware's own Baldur's Gate series and a japanese RPG like Final Fantasy, at least that's the way I see it. It has a streamlined, more personal and linear quest like in the JRPG's and it keeps a lot of the sidequests and in depth character development contained in most ARPG's. The result is that of an outstanding game that grabs you by the throat with its excellent story while still leaving you with enough depth to make the game your own.
The story is set four thousand years before the rise of the empire in the modern star wars series. The republic had only just defeated the mandalorians that the sith arrives and launch an all out assault. At their head, the sith are lead by two of the greatest jedis of the era, Revan and Malak, who were also subsequently the ones who defeated the mandalorians. Eventually the Jedi Order, led by a young and promising young Jedi named Bastila ambush and kill Revan, but that only helps Malak take the place his former master held and thus the game begins.
As always I hate doing synopsises because I think the player should experience the story, even the introduction, for himself. But I will say that the story ends up being one of the greatest ever told, especially if you're a Star Wars fan. On top of that, I know a lot of friends who didn't like Star Wars much before playing this game but after playing it became junkies. The game is THAT good.
On the gameplay side of things, it's hard to imagine an RPG playing better than KOTOR. You control your character either with a traditional WASD FPS setup or with the mouse. I preferred the mouse but some friends prefer the keys, to each his own. In battles you can pause whenever you want so you have the choice of having the game in real time or turn based, which is a great touched and a facet taken directly from the Baldur's Gate series. Once you select an enemy you have the choice of simply attacking or selecting an ability.
The characters will generally handle their own business by themselves, so you can just sit back and supervise what is going on, this is by no means an action RPG you don't have any direct input in the action, although the spectacular way in which battles unfold makes KOTOR a very nice game to watch in play.
When you create your character you select one of three classes (and whether you want to be male or female), Scoundrel, Scout or Soldier. That's a lot of S's I know. And when relatively early in the game you end up being a Jedi you have the choice between Consular, Sentinel or Guardian. It's a nice simple system which basically asks you whether you want to be a mage type character (Scoundrel and Consular), a midway type character ( Scout and Sentinel) and a pure warrior type ( Soldier and Guardian). There's a bit of everything for everyone. Oh and your original class doesn't decide the Jedi class you will be so you can be a Scoundrel Guardian if you wish. The Jedis have access to all the force powers in the Star Wars universe, and lightsabers. You gotta love lightsabers :)
One of the focal point of the game are a revamped form of BG's reputation point in the light-dark side scheme of things. Throughout the game your actions will tilt your personality balance toward the light side or the dark side, so you can play an evil or good character if you wish. Neutrality is also possible. Your alignment will not affect the story in the sense that it will be pretty much the same whether you're evil or good BUT it will affect your actions throughout the story. For example at one point you have to try and save a Jedi who has fallen to the dark side. If you are light side you can convince her to abandon her evil ways and come back to the light, but if you're dark side you can just kill her and say she couldn't be saved. The main story branch will not be affected but you will have one less character in your party and additional dark side points.
The main difference between the two alignments is in the ending.
I have finished the game light side on the Xbox and dark side on the PC, and on the graphical side of things there's no comparison: the PC dominates. When the xbox version came out I remember that people were quite disappointed at the graphics; jaggies galore were the main distracting point. On my PC I played the game at a resolution of 1280x960 with 4xAA/8xAF and let me tell you it was quite a sight to behold. Bump mapping on armor, no jaggies whatsoever, crisp textures. Felt like I was playing a different game! The only reason why I am not giving a 10 to this game is that there are some performance issues with ATI cards which require you to add some command lines to the game's .ini file which is distracting and could potentially be quite infuriating for a gamer who's not as knowledgeable about PC's and is just trying to play a good game.
There is a lot of voice acting in this game and it is all incredibly well made. Jennifer Hale, easily one of my favorite voice actors, is the voice behind Bastila and she sound terrific. All of the other character are also excellent. The sound of the lightsabers is also spot on. I'm not giving it a 10 because I felt like the music sticked too closely to the traditional Star Wars format and would have liked to see more variety in that department.
This is an RPG with a lot of replay value. You could easily have to play it 3 or 4 times to see all of the sidequests there is to see for every character. I myself have finished with twice and I am the kind of guy who doesn't come back to games easily, so that's quite a feat. The only major problems with the game are bugs, especially on the PC side. My game crashed every time I tried to change planets which required me to quit the game and come back, which kinda sucked. Also like I said earlier there are come performance issues that need tinkering to fix. If the game was rock stable it would surely have garnered a score very close to a 10 or maybe even a 10 who knows?
It's that good of a game and is highly recommended to anyone who likes RPG's, Star Wars, or heck even good games in general.
