System Xbox
type RPG (ohhh nooos another rpg)
Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is an excellant RPG, if your buying just one rpg this year, this would most definately be the one to go for. But Jake you might ask, Lucas has let me down before with video games based on the entire jedi thing (in fact lets just say everything since tie fighter all the way to now) What makes this one different.
Well to start with its an rpg, but not in the traditional turned based sense, you can stack commands, but everything is real time, meaning you have to depend on the AI scripts or a lot of switching characters in combat, and stacking commands, but generally the AI does a decent enough job and you only need to switch to emergency heal characters.
I've always had an affinity to games where you have a pool of characters to choose from when you create your groups to go off, and leave the rest at a central location, in this instance the ebon hawk your ship (well not really you stole it and killed its owner, so possession is 9/10 of the law anyway right?) I'm not fond of forced use of airships into games but the script really called for it in this one so it works.
The game allows you to make decisions and depending on how you act you either gain dark side or light side pts (read alignment). The great thing is as you travel down the dark side your face grays out and veins start popping out of yer head. So the game must be beaten on both light and dark to get the full endings and use out of your game. Some of the missions will be similar on dark and light sides but its really fun to be pure evil.
What this game did right.
Its not just about kicking the shit out of an endless supply of spawnable bad guys, in fact there are only a few areas with an infinite amount of respawns, so if you want to attain max lvl you will have to talk to people and do some quests. Not everyone drops everything they have so you cant 'farm' cash to buy all the nifty things you see in stores.
The player quests off your party members are really interesting, although they will occur with almost all of them (hk47 is different) regardless of what you select.
The comments 2ndary members say when they are in groups at certain events can be hilarious, so I've redone different encounters with differant people just to see what they say.
Pressing Y button while moving will cause you to whip out yer lightsabres and twirl them about in a must amusing fashion, it looks like your trying use to them edge the grass or something, all in all a fun effect to do while moving from pt a to pt b.
Paper doll effect on characters, its always nice to see when you change from heavy plate type armor to light cloth to see a difference in your character, additionally the many sunglasses type items look nifty
Deflecting blaster bolts at people with yer lightsabre
What is bad
The character models could have been much much nicer, the fact that they dont use much of the processing power avail in the xbox bothers me, because come on we want graphically stunning models, the wookie looks good, but the twilik is bizarre shaped while moving, a little more effort on them would have been really nice.
Fixed camera angles during cut scenes, i enjoyed the fact it used your actual character models at the time, and shows how far we have come in gaming, but sometimes your fixed camera angle is inside a person so you get the funky effect of seeing out from inside someone's head.
infinite health through the use of med packs, while there is a delay between using them during combat but its not so great as to cause a major problem
Pathing for bad guys is avg while your party members are poor and often get stuck on people buildings etc
IMPORTANT INFO
There are several important skills you will need to learn to get the most out of the game.
1. Persuade this is important for enjoying a lot of the fun stuff in the game a lot of quests and such will not be available without it (plus its a great way to get dark side pts)
2. Repair to unlock HK-47s memory (and upgrade him) only you can perform these repairs on him (soldiers and rogue class require 2 pts per skillup while scout only requires 1 pt)
3. Skill pts are determined by your intelligence (wis/cha/dex all seemed pretty worthless, however STR is key for melee classes int for skill pts.
4. To beat the game on light side and SAVE Bastilla you must be a dude
5. In many differant areas you can freely switch characters (non combat) by going to the map in the menu screen and hitting A, pressing X from this screen can return you to your ship so you can move about as quickly as possible.
6. If its named it probably is part of a quest or starts a quest
7. Have you main character learn persuade then repair after that awareness after that specialize each character to differant skills,
MMJ says, 'So much witchcraft involved with the force, who knew, Flanders definitely wont appreciate this'
MSBNGJ says, 'I really enjoyed the paperdoll effect of the characters way way way too much, i better go watch some lesbian pr0n to maintain the 2nd half of my name'
MAJ says, 'Blah any game with riddles and brain puzzles then using multiple choice answers is so frickin wrong its not even funny
RJ says, 'If your only gonna play 1 rpg this year, this is the game for you.'
Story 4
Graphics 3
gameplay 3
sound 3
Fun 4
overall 4