The Disaster Strikes Back.
As a huge fan of Bioware and the first KOTOR, I went into KOTOR II with admittedly large expectations, judging from the franchise, Obsidian's reputation and the generally sterling reviews. But a huge surprise to me -- this is a review of the first 10 hours of KOTOR II: The Sith Lords because, honestly, I couldn't bring myself to play any more without the urge to strangle myself with my keyboard cord.
The most glaring pain here is the pacing. Obsidian clearly designed a deliberately SLOOOOOW game to allow you, the main character, the time and space to really experience your environments, build relationships, explore lengthy conversation trees and immerse yourself in the game lore through archival security camera footage and database recordings. The recordings themselves are an interesting storytelling technique used much more effectively in System Shock II and Bioshock ... mainly because the stories of those two games in actually interesting, whereas KOTOR II's backstory is both dull and overly drawn out. Boring and brief is one thing; unfortunately here Obsidian's early story is boring and long as hell.
You'll spend over 4 hours in the starter level, an abandoned freighter with a slightly convoluted plot line that neither grabs your attention nor lets you get through it quickly. Soon after, you'll experience your first "city" -- and I use that word loosely as this is one of the most barren cities you'll ever see in a RPG. Whereas the environments in KOTOR weren't packed either, they didn't feel as generically barren and fake as the environments you see in KOTOR II.
I actually quit playing before my character ever acquired a light saber or meaningful Jedi powers, but reportedly it takes over 12 HOURS of gameplay before Obsidian allows you this most basic level of "fun". Non-Jedi combat is exceedingly dull and uninspired, and because the game doesn't support widescreen resolutions, you'll be playing in Windowed mode with assorted mouse lagginess and misalignment with menus and slowdown after battles where your character will stall for up to 10 seconds before you're able to loot anything or move at all.
If KOTOR II was some show-stopper in the graphics department, this might be understandable -- even for a 3-year-old game ... but the reality is the game looked like crap when it came out and it looks even worse now.
When it's all said and done, if you've played and enjoyed Bioware's KOTOR as much as I did, do yourself a favor and pretend the franchise ended with that game. This game is only worth it for die-hard completionists with a high tolerance for clunky gameplay and snail-like plot progression.
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