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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 -- Followup

We've been re-watching the Star Wars movies lately, which inspired me to pick KOTOR2 back up and finish it. (Here's a link to my initial impressions.) I'd originally given up on the game about 10 hours in, because the promised lightsaber was nowhere in sight. It turned out I was still a good 2-3 hours away from the lightsaber, but I stuck it out.

Allow me to recant everything I said in my initial impressions. Upon further play, I found:

  • The plot was pure George Lucas: overcomplicated, unsatisfying, and chock full of pseudo-mysticism.
  • After taking a break from it, I have a renewed appreciation for Jade Empire's fighting style. The abstraction level on top of D20 really doesn't work very well, since there's no good feedback for enemy challenge ratings, and deciding what kind of attack to use is really just guesswork.
  • The game went from insanely hard to insanely easy once I got force speed (extra defense and attacks) and a lightsaber. While entertaining, that kind of disparity is not good game design.
  • Several of the subplots were inconsistent, or poorly fleshed out. There's like 4 or 5 ultimate badguys, and most of them I didn't really care about. You can only play the shadowy mysterious presence card so many times.
  • I will say I did like the twist on KOTOR1's "mysterious veteran of the war with no past" storyline. But still, the reveals on that storyline were too slowly paced.
  • Starting and ending combat is irritating and distracting. Starting requires rebuffing your 20 second long buffs EVERY TIME. Ending requires finding the body to click on in order to loot. Why does a Jedi or Sith Master care about loot anyway? I think this game would have been better served leaving commerce out altogether. Maybe you get reputation (good or bad) for doing stuff, and can use that to improve your stuffs.

So, yeah. It had some good moments -- enough to keep me playing and to finish it. But it was much more deeply flawed than I originally thought.

Comments

I've been enjoying the first Lego Star Wars game over the last couple of weekends. It's fairly basic platformer action, but it's got the SW universe covered nicely, taking it all a little tounge-in-cheek, and I really like the way they integrate "The Force" into the gameplay. Relaying worlds with unlocked characters is lots of fun too.

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