Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Xbox
Disclaimer: I hope you don't expect me to type out "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords" every time I refer to the game during this review. What a mouthful! Can you imagine me having to sit there and type that out twenty times just for the sake of this little blog entry? Thanks but no thanks. Kotor 2 will suffice.
Anyway, I finished the first game in the series about six or seven months ago. I thought it was great. It had a few slow moments and a bit too many technical issues for me to give it a perfect score, but it was a well deserved A. I was very eager to dive right into the second game, but I figured I'd wait a bit so I didn't experience any Kotor burnout. Late February seemed like a good time to dive into it again.
I had played through this game once before, but it had been a really long time ago. I'd say about 2005 or 2006. I was a different Dan back then. I never saw my family. I hated my job. I lived with a girlfriend who drove me nuts. I was just very unhappy in general. As a result I was almost always inebriated in some way, shape, or form. I tried to think back on my memories with this game, but I could not for the life of me remember what this game was about. A few bits and pieces came back to me here and there, but for the most part playing through it now was like playing through it for the first time.
The premise of the game is that you are a former Jedi Knight. You had a hand in the end of the Mandalorian War (referenced often in Kotor 1). The Jedi Council disapproved of your actions in the war and cut you off from the Force and sent you into exile. Now your Force powers are coming back, but the Jedi are losing their war with the Sith and are scattered all throughout the galaxy. You have to round up these Jedi Masters and find out why you were stripped of your powers and exiled... and why your powers are now coming back. There is a lot more to it, but it is hard to explain without going into spoiler territory. The game's story gets a good bit of praise because it dives into the grey areas of the Force, whereas typically Star Wars is all about the light side and the dark side.
Graphically, the game looks a lot like the original Kotor. It sounds like the original Kotor. Even the combat system is almost exactly the same as the original Kotor. But I'll just come right out and say that I am not a huge fan of this game. It is a bit of a disappointment after I liked the first game in the series so much. I'll tell you why.
First off: the glitches. The first game had a lot of bugs, but this game is just ridiculous. Every few minutes the game (or at least my copy of it) would make this really loud staticy boom sound. There was nothing I could do to fix it either. I just had to deal with. I think I became pretty good at drowning it out over time, though. Combat would often glitch out too. Occasionally in the heat of battle things would start moving at an extremely choppy rate. While it was doing this I couldn't move, pause, or make any menu selections. I just had to hope I didn't die. Sometimes at the end of a fight my character wouldn't be able to move, and I would have to reset the game and pick up from my last save. There was even a point in the game where it would freeze completely every time I entered a certain area (the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine). I tried to enter it multiple times but could not get in. And you have to get in to be able to advance the game's plot! I was already over 35 hours in. If I would have had to start from the beginning I would have thrown the game in the trash. Luckily, when you enter the area the game introduces it with a small cutscene. I discovered that if you skip the cutscene you could avoid the game locking up. Man, I would have been fuming if I had played for so long but could not finish the game.
So as you can see, the technical glitches alone were enough to put a serious damper on my enjoyment of the game. But that is not all that is wrong with Kotor 2. Many of Kotor 2's worlds, particularly at the beginning of the game, are some of the most boring I have ever seen in a video game. The game starts with a glitchy, bug filled tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game. That's fine. I didn't mind the refresher. And it least it was brief. But after the tutorial, your character wakes up on an abandoned mining colony. Again, fine. Well, would be fine if you didn't have to spend four or five hours, mainly by yourself, exploring it. It is SO dull. The game's next world managed to be even duller, which I didn't think was possible. It is an orange and grey monstrosity of a space station. Seriously, so fugly and bland I could barely stand it. There is not much to do but wander around and talk to people, exploring multiple conversation branches.
Okay, so you may be thinking: you had to talk to people and explore conversation branches in the first Kotor too. What is the big deal here? I'll tell you the big deal. They are boring and forgettable! Ithorian politics? Fuel supply lines? Might as well be talking about the taxation of trade routes for hours on end. And I mean hours on end. Not to mention it has you backtracking back and forth through different sections of the station, each section taking a super long time to load. This area of the game takes another four or five hours to slog through. I had to battle to stay awake. Ten plus hours into the game and nearly nothing exciting had happened at all.
The good news is that once you get off the station things start to pick up. The game offers you a selection of different worlds to visit. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong world to start with. I picked Nar Shaddaa, AKA the Smuggler's Moon. It is a seedy, dirty looking place filled with the scum of the galaxy. Another boring and dull place to visit. The color scheme is all black and grey and depression. The missions are marginally more interesting than the missions on the space station. And it takes even longer to complete than the station. I must have spent a minimum of seven hours on Nar Shaddaa. And I hated every second of it. I was approaching twenty hours spent on the game and I was not having a good time whatsoever.
It was not until I got off Nar Shaddaa that I finally started to enjoy the game a little bit. My character finally got her lightsaber, which made battles a bit more fun (yes it takes you THAT long into the game before you get a lightsaber if you pick Nar Shaddaa first!). The rest of the planets are much more colorful, bright, and diverse looking. The quests become much more interesting. The game began to feel like the Kotor that I knew and loved from the first game. I will say I had for the most part a good time from this point on. Until I got to the end of the game.
I didn't know this at the time, but Kotor 2 was originally intended to be a lot more polished. It was rushed out to meet a holiday deadline, and as a result the quality suffered. That surely had something to do with the game's glitches and its bad pacing at the start. But as I neared the end I suddenly hit a certain point in the game where it became painfully obvious that things were getting cut short because they didn't have enough time to finish it properly. There are unexplained plot gaps. The game goes from being based on conversation and exploration with the occasional battle mixed in to nonstop battles and sabering through crowds of identical looking enemies for hours on end. I had enjoyed the story of the game, for the most part. But when the end of the game arrived it completely disintegrated and I had NO idea what the crap was going on. It is not good story telling at all when you have to Google what in the heck did I just watch?
So suffice it to say, the game ended poorly. Which is appropriate because it started poorly too. The middle of the game was decent, but man - I really don't know how to feel about this game.
Another thing for me to complain about: the difficulty level. Things are fairly easy once you get your lightsaber. But wow Nar Shaddaa was tough without it. There was this one group of criminals in the refugee sector that I could not beat to save my life. My party kept getting decimated instantly. I had to end up selecting my guy with the good long range skills (Atton) and constantly run away while firing behind me to pick off my enemies. A fight that should have been over and done with in two minutes took twenty instead. There is another section where a group of alien marauders took over my ship, the Ebon Hawk. I had to board the ship and take them all out. But I was SO absurdly under powered that they were wiping the floor with me. It took me multiple attempts before I finally resulted to cheap hit and run tactics to take them out. Then the game whisks you aboard a shuttle and takes you to a ship orbiting Nar Shaddaa to rescue your party leader. But you can only take two people aboard the ship. I made a bad choice and took a crappy character. Again, the game handed my ass to me. I began to think I wouldn't be able to beat the section at all because I was so thoroughly getting beat down. I couldn't even go back and reload an old save, because I only had one save file. But I kept at it and eventually was able to move on. I learned my lesson about multiple save files after that.
Again, the game gets much easier after you get your saber and learn more Force powers. But holy Jesus. Between the boredom of the first several planets in the game, the long load times, the glitches, and the high difficulty level, I was NOT enjoying myself early on in this game. If I had graded it at the twenty hour mark, it would have been an F for sure. But things do pick up after that.
And that is the saving grace of Kotor 2: the middle of the game. If only the whole game had been like that. Unfortunately, it was not. I wish they had had more time to work on this game and smooth out the rough edges. I wish they could have pieced together the plot so there weren't so many narrative leaps that confused the player. This game had potential to be really good. But instead it felt like a major chore to play at times. Despite Kotor 2's flaws, the majority of reviews out there for the game are positive. It's true, just Google Kotor 2 reviews. I guess I am in the minority when I say I didn't like this very much.
Overall:
D+
If you liked this review, check out my reviews for the following games:
No comments:
Post a Comment