Star Chores : The Stiff Bored

When Knights of the Old Republic appeared for the PC a couple of years ago it was greeted with great acclaim, with some reviewers going to far as to decree that this was the game of the year. Somehow I missed out on any first hand experience until a friend of mine heartily recommended I give it a shot and loaned me his copy. After many phone calls where "have you tried it yet" inexorably worked it's way into the conversation I bit the bullet and installed the thing.

Thirty minutes later I was uninstalling it. After some frustrating running down corridors, discoveries of about ten of the same kind of item and about 15 minutes of less than thrilling cut scenes, I was done. This was not the game for me. I simply could not see the appeal. I returned the cds to my friend, suffered various "friendly" observations about my taste in computer games and forgot about Knights of the Old Republic for ever. Well.... sort of anyway...

The ecstasy with which the release of this sequel Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - The Sith Lords has been welcomed forced me to consider giving it another try. After all, I have been horribly wrong about games before. I had a credit at the local EB and after suffering through the post-Christmas games drought I was desperate enough to give it a shot. After all, I really hadn't given the original a chance. Maybe this would be different. Millions of gamers around the world can't be wrong..... Or can they?

Sadly, I would have been better off sticking to my original instincts. Suffice is to say, if you found little to enjoy about Knights of the Old Republic, then The Sith Lords probably wont turn you on either. Shortly after installation my state of turned-on-ness was several feet below the floor. Let me explain.

Once again, the game is a third person role-play-adventure hybrid, strung together with a series of puzzle-filled areas and an awful lot of cut-scenes and cinematics. You start the game as one of the last remaining Jedi, who for some reason lies incapacitated as the lone survivor of a badly damaged freighter. The game has a fairly clever tutorial/prologue level where the player assumes control of a small droid, the only functioning member of the crew of the stricken vessel. Our intrepid droid is faced with the onerous task of getting key functionality back and guiding the ship to the nearest facility with repair and rescue capacities. Once this is over, the game-proper begins.

You start the game with only your original character, who may be chosen from one of three basic Jedi types, each with a different focus of base abilities. As you progress group members may be added, in a sort of Baldur's Gate style fashion, so it is possible to control an entire party. Combat is also reminiscent of Baldur's Gate, with the familiar "pause and queue up combat commands" for your characters method in use here.

Each character has a series of attributes, starting with generic Dungeons and Dragons style stats, Neverwinter Nights style special abilities and of course force powers. As your characters progress further attributes and abilities may be learned and put into use.

Graphically the game is pleasant to look at, without being really special. The cinematics are a bit grainy and the in game graphics look ever so slightly dated. Sound is excellent, with digitized speech all over the place and a host of very Star Warsy effects - Love those droid noises.

Where The Sith Lords, like it's predecessor falls down for me is in the game play. The games are both highly story-driven, and consist of running around areas, battling the enemy, which are annoyingly all more or less the same in each particular area, and accessing computer terminals to gain journal entries, which allow you to perform other actions at other computer terminals. Much of the game involves sitting through extremely tedious "log entries" in order to glean clues puzzles further down the road (the objective is almost always "opening a door"). The story based nature would work better if the tale being told was not so screamingly dull and predictable. There is no suspense, no surprises and really nothing that leaps out and grabs you about what is going on. It just unfolds rather mechanically and after about four hours of play in the name of "giving it a really good chance", I realised the game play was very much like a chore.

Adding to the dull overall feel of the game is the fact that the abundant equipment you find around the place looks almost identical and uninteresting in your inventory. You find so much damn stuff that new discoveries aren't really that exciting and equipping your character becomes more of a case of sifting through mountains of rubbish you are lugging around the place, than a pleasant reward for your hard work.

TSL does have a few clever features. I really enjoyed the way your main character can gain influence with other group members by behaving in a certain way and how your actions and responses steer your character towards the light or dark side of the force. Another neat idea is the way equipment may be modified and fitted with attachments. Swords may be fitted with special grips and so forth. It's just a shame that these good ideas are propped up by such insipid game play.

There is a lot of potential in KOTOR2: The Sith Lords, but I can't help but feel only hardcore Star Wars fanatics will find any lasting appeal. The hook factor is extremely low and while, if you give it a chance, it does grow on you a little, game play just never has the immersion or enjoyability factor to keep you there for a really long gaming session, as with truly great examples of the RPG such as Fallout 2 and Morrowind. I'll persist with this game a little while longer, perhaps i'll be back to change my overall rating. Somehow I doubt it. One for true Star Wars fans only.