Lots of ups and downs, but a must have for fans of the original...
User Rating: 9.4 | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords XBOX
There's a whole lot to tell about KOTOR 2, let me try to remember it all. First off, let me share my bias by telling you that I feel Kotor 1 was the best thing to happen to Star Wars since the Force, there, I said it. Let me also say that some sequels, make that 99% of sequels, are very untrue to their originals, and totally blew it. Not mentioning names (GOLDENEYE!). But Kotor 2 is quite different. Strangely enough, it wasn't even made by the same company. Obsidian took over here where BioWare left of from the original. And they bent over backwards to please the fans of the original. Everything you enjoyed from the first is back, but lots of flaws came with it. The visuals from the first were quite stunning, however, only a year later, they just seem unimpressive. They don't have quite the "shock and awe" factor the predecessor had. Still, they get the job done, making you feel like you're really in the "Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" era. However, you couldn't have felt this without the other great aspects at play here. The character action motions are very nice, even improved from the original, with hundreds of moves acted out in battle. Unfortunately, some character action gets repeated a lot, such as enemies falling in the same way, and NPCs always doing that stupid cringing motion right before they get struck down. The audio rocks though. With true to the series music, highly reminiscent of John Williams' masterpieces from the movies (he also composed the music for the Indiana Jones series). And the voice acting is pretty much top knotch. Not to mention that there are literally hours of voice acting on the disc, without sacrificing recording quality, I'm amazed. Pretty much the only reading you really need to do is your responses (your character still has no voice) and the speech of characters who don't speak galactic basic (english to us). The alien languages are pretty weak though, seemingly with only about 5 recorded tracks for every language for everything they can say. They gameplay holds very true though, the battles are actually exactly the same as the original. If you didn't like it, you won't like this one, and vice-versa. For those of you who don't know the original, let me break it down for you: you can freeze frame at any point in a battle, the battles are pseudo-turnbased, but they pretty much happen in real time. A great aspect is all of the abilities you can use. There are something like 50-100 force powers, plus lots of other abilities for melee, lightsaber, and ranged weapon weilders alike. The story comes back with a very compelling story, to be short. It makes you not want to put the game down at all. The main story line lasts about 40-50 hours, depending on how you play. But it doesn't really get dry anywhere. You're always exploring new areas, except in the last 5-10 hours, and there's always some new crisis to be taken care of. Sadly, the environments don't seem as vast as the original, with the exception of Telos in the beginning, which is kind of big, but not Taris big. Some of the planets you'll travel to are only 2 or 3 small maps. But it helps get through the long game faster. A really cool aspect of the story, though, is the fact that you can still choose light or dark side, and play almost an entirely different game depending on which you choose. This makes for some of the best replay value around. I'm a dark sider from the original, but this game seems to actually make it a lot easier to play light side than the first did. But now I must share the downsides. First up, framerate. The problem here is that there're so many variables in battle, such as all of your stats, and your active powers. This all slows the game down a lot. The framerate seems like it even gets down into single digits of frames per second, which is VERY slow. But fans remember this from the original well enough. This leads to a second downfall, which is freezing. The game seems to like to freeze when you've gone 1/2 hour plus without saving! It can get quite frustrating when you have to reset your Xbox and replay that much of the game. The AI can get annoying as well, it's not very evolved at all. In fact, it seems slower than the original. You can try to defuse a mine, and a teammate will walk right over it and explode it trying to get to an enemy. Or you can tell a Jedi teammate to be Jedi backup, but they'll rush right to the frontline and battle melee. Clipping is also a factor. The AI doesn't seem to realize that the fastest path from A to B with a wall in the way is not a straight line, this creates many problems, as you can imagine. You pretty much have to ignore these weak programming points in the game in order for you to stay in character and keep "role playing" as the genre suggests. Finally, not a programming flaw here, the online content download is gone. Which really isn't a huge loss, considering the level you downloaded from Kotor 1 totally blew. Well, in summation, great story, great audio, good battle, crappy lag and locking, as well as AI, makes for a decent game. But being a sequel to Kotor, that bumps it up a few knotches to great. For any fans of the original, you shouldn't be reading this, you should be playing. For fans of Star Wars and/or Rpgs, this is a worthy buy. If you're just looking for a rental to dick around with for a while, this game is a decent rental. May the Force be with you, always. --(We'll miss you always Alec Guinness) 
