Welcome to the imperial march down the drain. The force is not strong in this family.
The game opens with your character waking up in a Kolto tank with the most over-used and tired plot device called amnesia. Way too many game designers use amnesia as a tabula rasa for their main character rather than coming up with a good back-story for him/her. But anyway, in TSL you must go on an epic quest to save the galaxy from the evil Sith and at the same time find out who you are and why you have force powers but no lightsaber. A mysterious old Jedi named Kreia that guides you and becomes your first companion wakes you up and set the plot in motion. During the game you get to visit various planets like Telos, Korriban, Nar Shaddaa, Dantooine and Onderon. You'll get to level up your Jedi powers and gain new force powers and abilities here and there. You also pick up a few other companions along the way and the main story tries to be darker and more philosophical than the first game. Too bad it fails at that. The main story line in TSL has huge problems and huge plot holes. I'm not going to spoil it for you here but let me say that for most of the game you will have no clue as to what is going on. You will move on and do quests because it's a computer RPG and that's what you do in an RPG. The plot requires you to frequently come back to your ship to advance the plot, but you have no reason to do this and hence you might not get all the back-story you should. At one point you arrive at the thug's main base on Nar Shaddaa and the leader asks you why you have come, and that brought a tear to my eye because I didn't have a clue myself and I was hoping he would give me a villain's soliloquy to tell me what the hell was going on. Sadly he didn't and I was still left in the dark.
But you hope the ending will make up for it and explain why you have just spent 42 hours playing this game. Again I'm not going to spoil the ending for you but let me say that if you thought the ending to Fallout 3 was bad then that ending was freaking Shakespeare compared to the ending of TSL. I have never in my life seen a worse ending to a game than what we got in TSL. Nothing gets resolved and you still have no clue to what was the point of it all. The first KOTOR had a perfect ending with you defeating Malak and restoring peace to the galaxy. Here the game ends very abruptly and still it tries to give you a cookie-cutter ending. It doesn't work and after spending this much time playing, you want to feel like you have made a difference but sadly the game utterly fails here. Part of the problem stems from the game's effort to make it more dark and philosophical. Kreia is constantly spewing fortune cookie wisdom at you in long cut-scenes and dialogues and the main quest should be a search for identity. But the pseudo-philosophical nature of the game rings hollow and sounds more like mumbo-jumbo. I don't mind dark and philosophical games when done right ala Fallout or PST but when you mistake obscure for philosophical then I DO mind. Another big problem here is that this darker tone goes completely against the lighter tone of the Star Wars universe. The first KOTOR was precisely so fantastic because of its lighter tone. You felt you were a Jedi destined to do great things. In TSL you feel like you are caught in a surreal painting by Dali and all you can hope for is that the nightmare will end and you will wake up and know that TSL was just a bad dream.
Another problem is with the quests themselves. Not only does the quest-structure resemble the first game too much. Peragus in TSL could easily resemble Endar Spire from the first game but Telos also resembles Taris too much. After Telos you can visit different planets like you could in the first game and they even reuse some locations like Korriban and Dantooine. There are plenty of side-quests in the game but even here Obsidian manages to mess it up. Most of the quest descriptions are so vague that you will have no clue how to solve them. One quest was finding a female dancer for a gangster and that's all the info your journal would give you. So you are left with two options: You can either run around and talk to everyone hoping you by blind luck will find the one NPC the game has designated as the dancer and that the option will pop up in the conversation, or you can get a walk-through guide that will tell you the answer. Neither of these two options is very good or very fun. I'm not asking that a journal in an RPG should tell me the answers but a little more direction and motivation would have been nice. Hell, even Morrowind had a better journal and more direction than TSL. Also the way quests would often get expanded got to be annoying. It's the kind where you get a simple quest like sweep the floor. Then you try to get the broom but oh no, the door is locked and you must get the key in the next room – oh no, the power for the sliding doors is out and you must turn it on – oh no, the generator is missing s screw and you must find a new one – oh no, you don't know what a screw is and must research it first in an encyclopaedia – oh no, the librarian will not let you read the book and you must now kill the librarian – oh no, your weapons are missing – and around this time I get so frustrated I simply give up and hope it's not a main quest because it gets to be so freaking annoying.
Gone are also the big open planets of the first game and instead we get small confined linear levels. The level design in TSL is atrocious! Most of the planets you go to seem empty and small. Nar Shaddaa that was supposed to be a sprawling Metropolis looks like a small town with very few NPC's and most of them you can't even talk to. Obsidian also decided that it would be fun to create most levels like a maze so getting from point A to point B often takes an eternity. A lot of the rooms you enter are mostly empty with the exception of the same round container you will see through the entire game. No sane person (even in the future) would design living quarters this bland and boring to live in. The boring level design is only made worse by the colour palette that consists of grey, black, brown and burgundy. There are no vivid bright colours in this game except for your lightsaber. The planets themselves are also very poorly designed. Telos and Nar Shaddaa are almost identical and even Dxun that is kind of a rainforest environment is so linear that it's laughable and is nowhere near as great as Kashyyk from the first game. Where are the amazingly designed planets from the first game like Manaan or Tatooine with their interesting levels that you could explore and their bright colours? The Star Forge that was the end level of the first game is considered by many to be rather poor and badly designed with wave after wave of attacking Sith and what does Obsidian then do? They decide to make a carbon copy of that level with the end level of TSL. If the rest of the game seems empty then the end level in TSL is completely empty. The entire end level is designed as one big maze with an endless stream of baddies attacking you. It's terrible and will go over in gaming history as one of the worst designed levels in any RPG.
Gameplay is mostly the same as the first one. It works well enough but even here Obsidian manages to mess things up. A complaint from the first game was that it took too long to get your Jedi powers and lightsaber so in TSL you start out as a Jedi and that's fine. But then Obsidian makes the gigantically stupid mistake of having you wait for about 15 hours before you get your lightsaber (depending on what order you do the planets in). This is much longer than in the first game and it's a pain in the rear and totally unnecessary. So for the first 15 hours you run around with a sword from the middle-ages chopping down robots and aliens. Even when you get your lightsaber you still don't get that many crystals for it and you don't get that many extra lightsabers during the entire game, so when you turn your companions into Jedi they might still have to chop down robots with an ordinary sword. The inventory that was bad in the first game has now taken a turn for the worse and is literally one big mess. It's impossible to find anything in it and eventually you just hope you have the best gear equipped. As the game progresses and you get more companions you can freely pick you favourite ones. You can have two in your party and while it may be a little limiting it mostly works fine. The big problem here is that during various stages of the game you are forced to take specific ones with you or there are times when you most directly control one of the others. These sections are absolutely terrible and feel completely out of place. You have never used that companion before so they don't have good gear that is upgraded. If you sell all your excess gear then you might be out of luck and the character you are now controlling might be too weak to move on. The game is generally rather easy and when your main character gets a lightsaber (or two) he can cut through almost anything. But when the game forces you to take control of someone else the difficulty-curve skyrockets and the game becomes insanely difficult and it's not in a fun way. Path-finding is almost non-existing and the AI will get stuck on anything. If a group attacks you, your companions will try to attack the one enemy farthest away and if the path is blocked by a mob he will start to dry-hump it rather than to either attack the nearest mob or find another way. Another retarded thing from Obsidian is the fact that the enemies can resist your force powers 80% of the time. Even Kreia who had a wisdom score of over 20 (the stat that determines how hard it is to resist the force power) would still have mobs save constantly against her powers. Eventually I simply gave up and only used defensive powers that would boost the team's stats. In the first game mobs would rarely save against force attacks and only bosses was immune to them. When I play as a noble Jedi I want to be able to use force push, destroy droid, stun, force choke etc. most of the time but sadly you can't do that in TSL.
And now we come to the bugs – oh the bugs! The game was clearly not beta-tested properly and even with the two patches installed the game has more bugs than newly made horse manure on a warm summer day. To get the game running under Vista can be a pain and you may need to dl extra files and do all sorts of tricks to get it working. By far the biggest bug I encountered was a script that didn't kick in and so messed up an area. I was clearing out a base and went trough a tough fight and then spent almost two hours running around figuring out what I did wrong. Eventually a walk-through guide told me what to do but a cut-scene wouldn't trigger and I was clueless about what to do. I trip to Obsidian forums gave me the answer: It turned out at the start of the entire area I gave the "wrong" answer in a dialogue and hence the script didn't trigger and I was forced to reload an old save from before the start of that area. I lost almost three hours of game time on that account. Then there are the minor bugs: The game will randomly CTD, cut-scenes will often play without sound and a few times my force points would stop regenerating and I would be forced to save the game, then exit the game and start it up again and then they would work again. One time the graphics got corrupted somehow and I was forced to re-install the game. TSL is an absolute mess and Obsidian should be ashamed of themselves to even release a game this buggy. To be fair most of the blame probably resides with Lucas Arts that pushed the game out before it was ready, but I don't really care whose fault it is, all I can say is that my game is buggy beyond description.
Do I have anything good to say about TSL? No, not really. Fighting with lightsabers is still cool but that is not because of Obsidian. I have been gaming for three decades and have played over a thousand games and yet I can safely say that I have never ever been as disappointed with a game as I am with Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The game is one big mess of badly designed levels, poorly designed quests, bland graphics, a non-existing storyline, bad AI and more bugs than an ant's nest. I am amazed at how many people love this game and like Obsidian because I don't. The first game did everything right and showed once again that Bioware are masters of the RPG genre. I am still deeply, deeply stunned and surprised about how the former members of BIS could create something this atrocious. My advice is to steer clear of this mess and then get or replay the first one again because you will have infinitely more fun with that than you will ever get from TSL.