Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

During the war against the Mandalorians, two Jedis; Malak and Revan help win the war, but at a cost of turning to the darkside. In the following battle, Revan is defeated, and Malak begins amassing a Sith uprising.

You assume the role of an amnesiac Republic soldier who wakes up on the cruiser, Endar Spire as it is under attack by Sith forces. The intro is very immersion breaking. You ask the other character how to equip items and he starts talking about menus. It takes a while to really get going.

The gameplay is an RPG which is very Dungeon and Dragon-inspired in its systems. It even has the “You must gather your party before venturing forth” (from Baldur’s Gate) when you try to leave an area without your party members beside you. You can pause the combat, dish out new instructions, then watch the outcome. Bioware used this template in their Dragon Age series.

There's not many instructions to dish out though, so it is often very boring. It’s more like “Basic attack”, “ability 1, “abilty 2”. It’s one of those systems where you have a high chance of missing which looks a bit silly when you struggle to hit a stationary turret. Watching your soldier repeatedly fire lasers into the nearby wall is frustrating to watch and drags the battles on for longer than necessary.

There’s a decent choice of weapons. There’s ranged weapons of blaster pistol and blaster rifles, melée weapons like swords, lightsabers, or simply - fists. You can dual wield single-handed weapons, but will need the skill points to be able to take advantage of them.

Skills allow you to stealth, detect/disable mines, hack into computers, open locked doors and chests, repair broken droids to fight for you, and persuade in conversation. There are 9 other characters which join your party over the course of the game. You can only have 2 active at once. These characters have their own skills and it’s definitely beneficial to have someone who can unlock doors and hack into computers.

The AI can be very clunky. Once there was an enemy next to me, and 3 enemies further away. I instruct my character to attack the nearest enemy; then she runs up to the 3 enemies, turns around and targets the enemy I actually clicked on.

There’s plenty of dialogue, and you can click on dialogue options to progress the conversations. Many options seem quite abrasive. It’s clear which are darkside/lightside choices by the tone. Your character understands loads of alien languages, although the audio is delivered in the alien language, so the game involves a lot of reading rather than listening.

The areas can be large, but the main areas seem pretty linear. So even though you get quests and wonder where they are talking about, you should be able to find the area just by following the path. Across the game, you will visit Taris, Dantooine, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, and Korriban.

Medpacs don’t heal much, even when your characters have skills in Treat Injury. As long as you aren’t in a main mission area, you can teleport back to base which heals you, and are allowed to teleport back to the previous location. So you can just abuse that system instead of wasting medpacs. Later on in the game, you do gain access to much better medpacs but these should have been available much earlier.

Some characters will challenge you to a poker-like card game called Pazaak that is often a good opportunity to win some credits.

The collision box on your characters seems a bit too large, which means you often are prevented from moving because your party member is standing next to you. When this happens, you can just switch characters and move them out of the way.

There was a weird bug where you cannot move after combat, so you have to save and reload. This seemed to resolve itself if you enable V-sync.

I was really surprised at how well the graphics have held up.

After several hours of playing, I did find I enjoyed the game a little more, but it is still pretty bland and janky in terms of gameplay. Luckily, Bioware have done well representing the Star Wars universe. I’m aware that people regard this as one of the best Star Wars games, but there’s not much to the gameplay, and when it lasts around 30 hours; it’s a bit of a slog.

Knights is a game I remember playing a while ago on Xbox but never could get into it due to its length and also this was before I was into RPG's so I just didn't like the idea of not having full control over the character at the time. Then many years later I decided to finally play this on PC and well it was pretty solid. I am a fan of the original Mass Effect trilogy and seeing this early Bioware game shows an evolution of the company. Before this they were mostly known for Buldur's Gate which some consider to be the greatest RPG series of all time, but it was isometric and wasn't easy to get into for people who were more into games like Final Fantasy or Suikoden. Knights was more accessible in that it played more like a traditional RPG and you had the typical leveling system with basic skills and the dice roll combat. The combat is kind of annoying but at the same time its pretty simple and as long as you aren't underleveled its not too bad. The game itself isn't long but it has a pretty decent World and universe with an interesting story that is better than all the prequels combined. You have squad mates like the Mass Effect games who help you, but to be honest HK-47 and Zaalbar were the only ones I found interesting, the rest sort of feel a bit generic. HK-47 is half the reason this game is enjoyable, he's basically a homicidal droid that hates humans but sucks up to you and basically taunts your enemies.

The Worlds you visit in this are typical Star Wars, they are okay but don't stand out too much, but I think that may be more of a limitation to the time this game was made. The missions themselves are pretty standard go to this place, kill these enemies, collect these things, but the enemies in the game are pretty interesting and its cool seeing actual monsters and species from the Star Wars universe. Plus the main twist in this game was handled well and managed to not be as predictable as I thought. There are some stupid moments in the story and some characters in this just act dumb at times, but to be honest its better than most Star Wars games. I'll go as far as to say this is probably the second best Star Wars video game only next to Battlefront 2 (the non-shitty original one).

While it made great use of the license, redefining several tenets of Star Wars without cheapening them, the dice roll combat system does not lend itself well to this era, and being a fairly early Bioware title, the dialogue suffers in retrospect. Which would not be a problem if this were a short game, but the emotional fragmentation on display, especially by Carth, gets weary even before you hit the big plot twist, which is admittedly a damn good one. Was revered at the time for good reason, but does not hold up.