Games That Matter ~ Xbox ~ Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Sound: 9
Graphics: 9
Gameplay: 9.5
Replay: 6
Multiplayer: No

LucasArts is known for making some great games based on the Star Wars movie franchise. One of their best is undoubtedly the Rogue Squadron series for the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube. However, LucasArts is definately not known for making RPG games. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is their first venture into the RPG world. First released on Xbox, and followed by the release for the PC, KOTOR, as most have come to call it, has really surprised gamers everywhere.

For their first try, LucasArts has done an amazing job with KOTOR. The game is easily the best RPG for the Xbox right now. The gameplay is mostly smooth. It has a few quirks and a couple jittery spots, not to mention WAY too much loading time (for the Xbox, PC has almost no loading times), but overall the game plays very well. Every RPG gamer will love this game. The battle system is unique, you can either give characters orders while playing, pause the game and give orders, or just set preferences for what you want the character to do most and let them fight by themselves. You can give multiple orders per character in battle and they will complete each one in order, one per turn. So you can tell them to Attack, then use a Force Power, then heal, and the character will proceed to do each one. Characters automatically heal themselves when their health gets too low, but sometimes they wait too long and end up dying, so it is better to just tell them when to do it. Characters automatically try to deflect attacks from swords and blasters, and also put together combos with their weapons, which is alright but I would have preferred the option to do it myself in some cases.

The graphics are very nice in this game. The characters are well modeled, the weapons look very realistic, and the environments look realistic. You can see quite a ways away and the backgrounds are very good. Up close, like in battles, both your characters and enemies are smooth and don't have jagged edges. The weapon fire from blasters looks like that of the movies (meaning it looks pretty good). The lightsabers in this game are by far the best looking (and do the most damage). The environments are done very well, water looks realistic, plants have leaves and vines and so forth. However, I do not believe that the graphics are so good the game had to have as many loading points as it does. It seems if they would have worked on it a little longer they could have used the Xbox's power to do some loading while your playing, like in Halo.

The sound in this game is very good. You have your Star Wars style music, blaster fire, good voice acting, and of course, lightsabers. The sound of the lightsaber being turned on is very satisfying, knowing a battle is about to ensue. And in battle when the character is swirling and slashing with them the lightsabers make the appropriate sounds. Blaster fire sounds just like in the movies, and it is always good to hear the sound of it being deflect off of one of your characters swords of lightsabers. The voice acting is solid. The characters sound as they should. I just wish your own character actually said something.

There really isn't much replay here. You can play it and go for both light and dark, because each has its own ending, but really the game progresses the same either way. Going one way or another does affect the game, but not too much. Being able to go to more planets and free roam a little more would have added more replayability. There just isn't much to explore in this game and that really detracted from the overall experience. But either way this game is at least a good rental and will provide a solid 40-50 hours of gameplay.