Games Corner | Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords Review
Before I start the review-proper for this game, I want to note that there will be a companion piece to this one that I plan to write. Unlike this one, the companion piece will contain spoilers for the story, so if you haven’t completed this and want to before knowing spoilers, then it might be best to avoid reading until doing so. Otherwise, the companion piece for this review will be linked here retroactively once it is finished. With all of that out of the way, we’ll begin the review proper.
I have always seen Knights of the Old Republic games in people’s top 10 Star Wars games lists and my only prior experience with this game is having seen my brother play through it years ago. I know very well that I am late to the bandwagon. This mostly has to do with the fact that I was never really interested in role-playing games- at least, I wasn’t. Other than games like Pokemon or the Mega Man Battle Network and Starforce series, RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic were always a little intimidating to me. This was mainly due to the sheer length of the story. One of the things that turned me off from RPGs, especially JRPGs, was that I would leave the game for a while, pick it up again, and have no idea what I was supposed to do. Then I would switch to a different game.
Of course, this is mostly because I’m used to games like Mario or racing games like Forza, or puzzle games like Tetris, where the narrative isn’t the central aspect of the game. But ever since my getting into Dungeons and Dragons, and the unavailability of people to play the campaigns I’m in most of the time leaving me starved to want to play something similar, I felt I was finally ready to go into this game.
As of writing this, this was my first playthrough of the game. Also, as the game cover I included at the top suggests, I will be reviewing the Xbox version of this game exclusively. But I am doing so with full knowledge of the fact that the PC version available now is the superior version. It just happened that I had the Xbox version and decided to go with it since it’s already there. I was willing to accept the fact that the Xbox version was going to have a little less content and have more bugs than the PC version, as well as not have the best graphics and performance and I will not use any criticisms towards those things blanket across all the ports of this game. With that said, I guess I should preemptively recommend that if you do want to play this game you should play the PC version as it is the definitive version from what I’ve heard.
Story:
Since this game is a role-playing game, there is a much higher emphasis on the story than games of other genres. I will avoid all spoilers for this review so I won’t give too much away. That said, the story for this game is quite serious for a Star Wars game. Star Wars has always been a more lighthearted adventure/fantasy series, and while the sense of fantasy and adventure are ever-present throughout this game, it takes a much darker tone.
The game begins about five years after the end of the first one, and the Republic is under threat of collapse from the Mandalorian Wars and the Jedi Civil War. The Sith still exist in the unknown regions of the galaxy, waiting to strike down the last of the Jedi. The story begins with the approach of a heavily damaged freighter called the Ebon Hawk flying into an asteroid field that was formed by an apparent explosion of the entire side of the planet Peragus. The Ebon Hawk is hastily patched together enough by the ship’s last remaining Astromech droid and the ship docks into the hangar of a large asteroid that had been retrofitted into, what you learn shortly later on to be, a mining facility. Your character is awoken in the hospital wing of the facility to a strange, eerie voice, and the adventure begins.
The title crawl sets up the stakes of the game is a great way, and as the game progresses, you become increasingly aware of the sinister, dark powers that threaten to consume the entire galaxy. That, alongside the mystery surrounding who your character is, or was, and who the series of companions you meet along the way on your journey as well, really helps to push the story forward.
Because of the nature of the story, there is a constant tension that you are provoking the evil to come out of its place in the unknown regions and strike. On top of that, there is a feeling that you are always being watched, but by whom, you don’t know. And you are always being hunted. This is all despite the fact you have no idea why, at least in the beginning.
The larger story and the smaller stories dealing with the other planets and characters you encounter along the way makes for a very believable and immersive experience. Every single time I started this game up, I was immediately transported into this game’s universe and it was very difficult to break myself away from it once I was in it. I took my time to talk to the NPCs and took on and tried to accomplish as many side quests as possible.
This story is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking that I’ve experienced in Star Wars. Without giving too much away, it has you rethinking what you thought you knew about the force, the Jedi, and the Sith in a way that no other Star Wars media can do.
The only downside to the story is that the end of the game felt a bit rushed and it didn’t leave me off on an especially satisfying note. The game’s epilogue is relegated to a giant end-game exposition dump that was a little clunky if I’m going to be honest.
Overall, the story is great. I appreciated the apparent amount of time and care that was put into writing this story and it turned out to be one of the most immersive gaming experiences I’ve had to date, and for someone who was, for many years, not inclined towards such narrative-driven games, I believe this is an accomplishment.
Score: 4/5
Presentation:
I understand that talking about graphics from a game that is almost 15 years old and comparing it to games of today is not a fair thing to do. But it’s not my intention to do such a thing. Graphically, I think this game is fine for the most part. I don’t necessarily have an eye for graphical fidelity or anything like that, but I can say that this game looks pretty good for a game from 2004/2005. What I like the most from this game graphically is the lightsaber blades. I’m not entirely sure why, but the lightsaber blades look very nice when they are either idling or being swung. Even when they are being activated, the visual aesthetic, although maybe looking a bit dated, reminds me of what lightsabers looked like in A New Hope. Of course, some of the textures in this game look a bit outdated. In particular, in the scene where your ship docks inside the Ravager, the textures on the Ravager were noticeably low-resolution even for a game from its generation. Also, there was a weird thing with colors, where gray objects would be partially shaded green. There were many incidents where that kind of color bleeding would occur, especially with the color green.
As far as art direction is concerned, I think it was very fitting for this story. Knights of the Old Republic II is supposed to be a darker story than the first, so things are made to look more dreary with a greater presence of grays, greens, and browns and other muted colors in the environments. However, the lightsabers were still the brilliant colors they always were so that contrast had a pretty cool effect. Of course, gaming went through a period where everything had to be brown and gray with muted colors in order to look more gritty and realistic, and it did start around the time this game was released, but I don’t think this game was following the bandwagon, but instead making that choice purely with the story in mind. Because of that, I don’t think the direction they went in that area is a bad thing. If there was one complaint I would have about this direction they took is that some of the areas in the worlds and ships you explore end up having a samey look to them and it can be difficult sometimes to know where you are and where you’re going. Maps help to mitigate this issue, thankfully. Everything looks like Star Wars in this game. Nothing feels out of place with the environments or the ships or anything in this game. Everything feels believably like Star Wars which only further helped with immersion into the universe. It was different, however. It wasn’t trying to evoke feelings of nostalgia and this game treads the line between familiar and different at the same time in such a way that I haven’t seen since.
I did encounter performance issues while playing this game. Maybe it wasn’t optimized the best when making the Xbox port, but I noticed on numerous occasions where the frame rate would drop noticeably. I’m not the type of person to keep track of the number of frames per second while playing a game, but whenever there were 5 or 6 enemies on screen at the same time or whenever I went into the big courtyard area of Nar Shaddah, I would notice frame drops. The biggest issue I encountered, however, was a glitch I encountered when meeting the Jedi master on Dxun. I chose to be escorted by the Mandalorian guard to the Mandalorian base and the game froze at the loading screen. This forced me to start again from an older save. Luckily for me, the older save was just before the point where the game crashed, so I didn’t lose very much from that. But it is a pretty big bug and it was something I felt I needed to share. Other than that, though, I did not encounter any big game-breaking glitches or anything like that.
Overall, the presentation is all right. It has aged. Character models aren’t the best, there are performance issues that occur more often than I would like, the game crashing for no apparent reason and doing so upon repetition, and some areas feeling a bit copy and paste. That said, the game looks and feels like Star Wars and the art direction helps to paint a picture of a galaxy with a bleak outlook.
Presentation: 3/5
Gameplay:
This game is an RPG set up similarly to Dungeons and Dragons as a D-20 system. You create your character by picking one of the three classes you can play as, setting what your character looks like, and allocating points to your character’s stats and skills. Your character also earns feats and force powers as you level up. This was an aspect of the game I enjoyed. Making the choice as to where my next skill and stat points were going to go every time I leveled up always felt like I was making important choices based on what direction I wanted my character to go in. However, if you’re not a fan of manually leveling your character up, there is an option for you to have it done automatically. I was afraid that the game might level my character up automatically without giving me the choice until I died against a character at too high a level for me because my character was supposed to be at level 8 at that point. I guess that’s one con against the game. When you first start, it might not exactly be clear when you’re supposed to level up. The notification is a bit subtle. Your character’s icon at the bottom of the screen has a translucent, yellow arrow superimposed over your character’s face and a little chime plays. Maybe I’m just oblivious, but I feel like there was a better way to implement telling the player when it’s time to level up your character.
From watching game play of the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic II I can say, without a doubt, that the combat controls on PC are enviable if you’re on Xbox. The user interface for combat feels a bit clunky. At first, you don’t notice it, but once you get to the end game, it becomes an issue. The Xbox version was supposed to be optimized for controller input. At the bottom of the screen, when combat starts, a little green bar appears. On that green bar, there are little squares. Each square is dedicated to specific actions. One of them is for combat and other miscellaneous actions like opening things and talking to people. Another is for offensive force powers. Another is for setting explosives. Another is for defensive force powers. Another is for upgrade items like stimulants and med packs. And another is for your character’s fighting form. You toggle between these little squares with the D-pad on the controller by pushing either left or right. You also toggle between actions within those squares by pushing the D-pad up or down. This sounds simple, and most of the time, it doesn’t get in the way, most of the time. One of the biggest problems with this whole control arrangement isn’t necessarily the arrangement in itself, but the fact that the Xbox controller has a notoriously unresponsive and inaccurate D-pad. In intense combat scenarios, I found myself trying to go for force heal, but ended up dying because pressing the right arrow on the D-pad sometimes registered as pressing up. These fighting sequences require rapid input and, unfortunately, this user interface is not up to the task. It feels very slow. But that’s not the only problem with it. The other problem I had with it was if I wanted to use force heal more than once, I had to select it and then move the cursor back to where force heal was again to use it a second time. I understand that you can queue actions using the X button rather than using A, but sometimes you have to clear that queue because, say, the boss you’re fighting hit you with a critical attack and did a lot of damage. From what I understood, pressing A was the only way to reset the action queue, and since pressing A sends your toggle cursor back to the leftmost square in the action select box automatically, it makes the process very cumbersome. Maybe I’m just bad at this game, but I died several times during the final boss fight because of how unresponsive and nonsensical this system is.
With all that said, it’s not completely broken. For the majority of the time, it won’t get in your way, but this is remedied completely by getting the PC version. I see what they were going for with this interface, but to me, it feels incomplete on Xbox.
Another weird thing about combat in this game on Xbox is selecting your target. When a target is selected a reddish-orange cross-hair highlights the enemy your character is targeting. This is done automatically, but you can change which target you want to go after first if there are multiple enemies you’re facing. The way you change targets is with the L and R triggers. It’s a little weird to get used to at first, but it becomes intuitive fairly quickly. The problem, however, lies in the targeting system itself. I don’t know how it chooses targets but there were occasions during my playthrough where I wouldn’t be able to target an enemy I wanted to go after without having to press one of the triggers several times to get to them even though that enemy was right next to the guy it automatically targeted. There doesn’t seem to be a clear logic for how the system chooses to target some enemies over others, though it could be that I might have rolled a bad perception check? I honestly have no idea, but it was a little annoying. Not broken, but I felt like it could have been polished a little better.
You can also choose to run from combat if you want. Whenever the game spots an enemy, the game pauses and gives you a fight or flight option when it targets the enemy. This is when you can decide your next action if you choose to go into battle. To avoid fighting because, say, it’s against a small monster that hasn’t noticed you yet that you don’t feel like fighting, you can press the white button and it will cancel the battle. One of the biggest problems, however, is if you want to run somewhere safe in the middle of a battle. This has less to do with button presses as it does with fighting the camera. As it is expected, you move your character with the left analog stick and control the camera with the right one. But when you enter a battle, the camera automatically focuses on whoever is being targeted by the battle system. If in the middle of the battle, you need to put some distance between yourself and your enemy or enemies, it can be a bit of a hassle. The problem is that you don’t have complete control of the camera when you run from a battle. You can turn the camera into the direction you’re running but as soon as you let go, it snaps back to whatever is being targeted. There didn’t seem to be a way, that I could find, to cancel combat in the middle of it, other than running away, which is very difficult because of this camera issue. The white button only pauses the game at that point. The game seems to only give you an option to run from a battle at the start, but then once you agree to it, the game seems to try very hard to keep you committed to it by making it difficult to see where you’re going when you run away. This is especially so when you’re in cramped corridors and you run into a dead end. Even though there are pits, luckily, the designers of the game decided not to let you fall into them. So at least where the final boss is concerned, that isn’t something you have to worry about on top of the camera.
Combat, however, isn’t the only aspect of this game that matters. Since it is a role-playing game, a significant amount of the experience is interacting with other characters. This game gives you the option of choosing the light, the dark, or the gray side. Your actions and responses to characters and which side quests you choose help to determine which direction your character ends up going, and which ending you get.
Ironically enough, one of the most empowering parts of this game was having the ability to pick your battles. In so many other games, violence is the default answer. But this game provides you with opportunities to negotiate. On top of that, you can choose your negotiation tactics. You get a lot of options whenever these instances come up and it was pretty cool to be able to show restraint and find a peaceful way of accomplishing your goals without having to kill anyone. The best example of this is when you speak with the alien in charge of overseeing the refugee sector on Nar Shaddah. I understand that, with a narrative-driven RPG like this, with a final boss that you have no choice but to fight, can’t give the player these options all the time, but when it does give these options to the player, it helps to add to the immersion. Even if some players go in with a scorched-earth policy, to begin with, giving the player the option, gives the player an amount of autonomy that many other games don’t even consider. I found actively choosing to not fight in favor of diplomacy to be extremely empowering.
There is also a mechanic in the game where you can upgrade your armor, and weapons, or crafting your supplies and weapons by buying or scavenging parts. This mechanic is very useful for helping you do extra damage to your enemies. The only tricky thing about upgrading weapons and armor is that you need to make sure that once you’ve chosen all the upgrade components you want to apply to your weapon or armor is that you have to press the button dedicated to putting it all together at once. It sounds trivial, but there were occasions I forgot to do that and the upgrades didn’t end up being applied at all, and I had to go back and re-select the upgrades I wanted again.
Another mechanic in the game regarding the role-playing element is the influence mechanic. Winning and losing influence on other characters that join your party is done through the way you interact with those characters. If you answer the way they like, you gain influence over them. It also affects their alignment and you get to learn more about the character’s history and form a closer bond with them, the higher your influence becomes. If you try to ask them questions about their past without gaining a certain amount of influence over them, they will angrily dismiss your questions until you win them over. It’s a very cool mechanic that I wish I utilized more during my playthrough.
Navigating menus in this game can sometimes be a little confusing mainly because of the inconsistency in the controls used to navigate through them. Of course, predictably, in all circumstances the A button selects an item, the left analog stick- or the D-pad, whichever you prefer, scrolls through the list of items, and the right analog stick scrolls the item information screen that gives you the stats on certain items that you have or want to buy. The part where it becomes a little inconsistent is when you want to change menu tabs. When you’re buying something, items are organized in tabs, from left to right there is, “All Items,” “Ranged Weapons,” “Melee Weapons,” “Miscellaneous,” and “Lightsaber.” You toggle through these tabs by pressing the Y button. But when you’re navigating the tabs on the start menu to go from leveling your character up to equipping an item to your character, you need to use the L or R triggers. This might be a minor nitpick, but there were times when I would be trying to buy something from someone, or checking what’s in their inventory, and found myself trying to navigate the tabs using the triggers like I was so used to on the Start Menu. The buy/sell menus do mitigate this issue by telling you the controls but, I felt like there could have been a little more consistency. But this is a minor nitpick.
Your character, themselves, moves around fine. I didn’t think the character’s regular pace was too fast or too slow, and if you wanted to move faster than the default running speed, you could easily equip the speed-enhancing force powers to aid with that. It should be noted though that the force speed power does blur the screen a lot while running when it’s in use and it can be a little difficult to see. This is especially the case, considering the graphical fidelity being the way it is, you might find yourself running into a wall momentarily.
The camera control is a bit stiff when you’re trying to look up and down, but you don’t need to worry too much about looking vertically so it isn’t that big an issue. I only brought it up because I’m the type of person that likes to look at the environments in games and if there are high rise buildings or battles taking place in the skies, I like to look at those, but it does not affect gameplay whatsoever.
The only other issue I can find with the control is the result of bugs related to pathfinding. Sometimes your character, when you choose to enter combat, will run off in a weird direction and you have to manually hijack your character to help better focus the AI’s pathfinding. It’s not that big a deal for me, I’ve played games with bigger issues with that than this game and it was almost unnoticeable for me until I started thinking about writing this review. It might feel quite weird for people who are more used to modern RPGs, but again if you play the modded and updated version on PC, the majority of these issues are nonexistent.
Control is one of the most important aspects of a video game, seeing that it is an interactive medium. Despite my criticisms of the control scheme for combat, again, I have to say that these problems don’t manifest themselves until the late stages in the game, particularly when you are making your way through the final temple on Malachor V. The combat controls are, otherwise, reasonable through the rest of the game. There are some inconsistencies, but most of them are small, and any bugs encountered with pathfinding are easily corrected manually.
The role-playing aspects were deeper than I expected in this game and I greatly appreciated that. I still feel like I could get another 5–10 hours out of this game just from utilizing the influence mechanic more earnestly. And despite my under-utilization of that mechanic, it still provided a very compelling and immersive experience. This game gives the player more agency than many games of its time- on console- did not and I found that quite refreshing.
Overall, the gameplay is solid. The controls might be able to use a little bit of polish, but for a game rushed out and ported to Xbox, I would say it’s still tolerable if you are patient with them.
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Soundtrack:
Whenever you make a Star Wars game, the soundtrack is probably one of the easiest aspects of the game to finish. This is mostly because the entire Star Wars franchise is famous for its film soundtracks by John Williams. Most Star Wars games simply end up reusing parts of the soundtracks from the films whilst also emulating the style with new tracks unique to the game itself.
Emulating John Williams’ composition style for a Star Wars game can be hit-or-miss for some games. The first game that comes to mind when I think of a couple of misses would be from Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike.
With that said, the unique tracks present in this game are nothing short of miraculous as far as the game’s artistic direction is concerned. I mentioned before that the art style in this game is different but still feels and looks like Star Wars. It has an uncanny ability to look familiar while being unique to itself and not feeling like it’s banking on nostalgia. The soundtrack is consistent with this.
While, of course, the soundtrack is playing on easy mode just because it’s attached to Star Wars and its award-winning backlog of iconic soundtracks, but even the unique tracks don’t sound like they are trying to pander to nostalgia. The unique tracks don’t stick out in such a way where they feel out-of-place, and in most instances, it is the exact opposite. The game’s unique tracks are so well written that it is sometimes incredibly difficult to be able to tell if it’s one of the film soundtracks or the game’s.
Even though it didn’t necessarily have to, the original compositions for this game emulate John Williams’ style so well, that it only adds to the quality of immersion this game offers. The soundtrack makes the game feel like an extended Star Wars film in a setting that takes place long before the events of the films. The amount of care that went into crafting this setting goes as far deep as the soundtrack and that is something I feel like I can’t commend enough.
Soundtrack: 4.5/5
Conclusion:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords is a great game. Although it was rushed out, Obsidian Entertainment still put out one of the most immersive games Star Wars has still yet seen, even 15 years later. The story in this game still manages to contribute more to the Star Wars lore than any piece of media that has been released since then, from what I know. And with its modding community having worked over the years to patch this game and expand it to make it the game it was too rushed out to be, it is probably the best Star Wars game ever made.
The Xbox version, unfortunately, does not have the same ability to be contributed to in the same way the PC version can. Because of that, this version of the game is lacking in many areas, and I think that if people were to play this game today, it would not hold up as well as it did back in 2004/2005 when it was new. That said, I am a retro game enthusiast and, because of that, I understand that some of these older games have their quirks and I am patient enough to manage my way around them and still see the game for the quality that it is. That said, I would like to emphasize that the definitive way to experience this game in all of its glory is to play the PC version. Unless you’re like me, who enjoys the authentic patina of vanilla aging, unfinished games, then there’s no real reason for anyone to opt for the Xbox version.
That said, my final score for this version of the game is: 3.75/5
