A faithful follow up to the original and an excellent game worthy of any RPG fan.
User Rating: 8.6 | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords PC
For those of you who played the original KoTOR, you will find The Sith Lords to be a game that is nearly identical in its gameplay and style. For those who haven't, in brief, it is a third person adventure/RPG set in the Star Wars universe. You control a party of up 3 characters at a time with a chasing camera view. Combat is done in a turned based fashion. As someone who is a great fan of the RPG genre, I have definitely enjoyed the two KoTOR games and although I won't say that they are the best RPGs ever written, they are definitely very good. In The Sith Lords, the game continues the style of the original by having a rich and detailed story supported by an enormous amount of dialog, all of which is spoken (with the option for you to see subtitles). What's more impressive than the quantity of spoken dialog is the quality of the voice acting, something that seems to be lacking in games these games. I think this is the greatest strength of the game and something I very much applaud. In The Sith Lords, you'll find some additions to the original game. The are more force powers, more feats and more weapons and items and you will acquire a larger party of followers. The game also places a greater emphasis on your skills in opening new dialog options throughout the game. In addition to buying and selling items, you now also have the option to use workbenches to breakdown existing items into components which can then be used to construct new items that you may need. The graphics are really nothing to be impressed with. By today's gaming standards, they are fairly mediocre but are good enough to carry the game. At least, you can tell that they put effort into making use of high resolution textures, something that seems to not usually happen in games that are developed for both the XBox and PCs. The problem mainly lies in a low polygon count with lots of simplistic structures and straight hallways. You get to learn a bit about all of the characters that join your party and through deep dialog trees, you can learn new skills and teachings from them. There are no whiny characters this time around which is a good thing. You also get to see some interaction between your characters which is interesting. Another good thing about the game is that it is very satisfying in length. Many games today are really too short, but it took me 60-70 hours to finish this one (and I tend to do as many quests as I can). I have two complaints with the game. The first is that it is too easy. I increased the difficulty level and I still found the game generally a bit easy with the occasional challenge. I maxed out my light side points well before half way through the game and I generally like to see such things happen much farther into the game. My second complaint is that on quite a handful of occasions, the game forces you to play with specific members of your party, often one at a time, and without warning. This generally results in you having to play a character that is not entirely prepared. I generally keep my best weapons and items on a few of my favorite characters and when suddenly I have to play with different characters, I do not have access to those items that are currently equipped by the others. And sometimes, you find the game forces you into this position several times in a row which means that you cannot simply reload the game to immediately before because it may have been quite a while since you had access to all of your party. If you enjoy this type of game, I would also like to recommend to you Anachronox another sci-fi adventure/RPG whose gameplay style is very similar to KoTOR and a game I think is even better. 
