Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Review by Jen
February 2004

If ever there was the perfect "bridge" game for the adventure gamer wanting to cross over to RPGs, this is it. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has a high questing-to-combat ratio, doesn't require much in the way of reflexology, and is adaptable to all manner of playing styles.

The premise is nothing special, just your typical save-the-galaxy fare. You start off with what amounts to the battle tutorial, in which you must escape a Republic spacecraft that has been boarded by the opposing Sith over the planet Taris. Bastila, a Jedi shipmate whose Battle Meditation ability will determine the outcome of the [cue music: da-dah da-da-da-daaah-da] Star Wars, is captured by these Sith. After you learn the controls (easy, and you don't have to be very nimble-fingered as long as you know where to find the "pause" button), you crash-land on Taris and wake up in a strange apartment with a strange man in your room, the rakishly handsome yet disarmingly humble Republic soldier Carth, who becomes your first of nine possible party members. You set out to free Bastila, who has been captured and taken to a different part of the city.

As you progress, you will visit several other planets in the galaxy, er, Galaxy with a capital G, I meant to say. It is the individual stories on each of these planets that really shine, as well as the character development. Your party members, in particular, and many of the NPCs are fully fleshed out, living, breathing, human beings (or not). Each planet has its own political system, its own environment (although all are strangely Earth-like), and its own indigenous species (although all are strangely humanoid). The overarching story, as well, despite its trite underpinnings, will keep you moving right along, and it delivers a couple of big surprises.

Battling is a combination of real-time and turn-based, which is to say that the D&D-style dice-roll fights play out automatically—you can pause between each turn to choose a particular attack or item if you like, but if you don't take any action, the battle will continue to its conclusion without your input. In the first two-thirds of the game, the usual turn-based strategies do matter a little (on the easy setting); in the final third (except for the end game) it was practically impossible to get killed. I'd just put down the controller, get a drink or a snack or go potty or what have you, and pick it up again once the fight was over.

Combat comes in three levels of difficulty: easy, normal, and hard. And you can change your selection anytime during the game. I started off with the "normal" setting and was doing just fine, but the battles were too long and too repetitive, so I switched it to "easy." (I'm a lover, not a fighter, tee hee ... although sometimes there is something supremely satisfying about kicking video butt.)

For the most part, combat really is an ancillary component of the game. The only reason for it, I think, is to serve as a vessel for delivery of experience points and items, and like as not to extend the play time—without the fighting, the game would be considerably shorter. There is not an overabundance of battling and, except in the areas populated by hostile wild creatures, enemies once killed stay dead.

If you find the prospect of the typical RPG stats management daunting, no worries—KOTOR gives you the option of auto-leveling or selecting the areas where you want to focus your abilities. I don't dig the D&D, daddy-o, so I opted for the auto-leveling throughout the whole game.

There are quite a number of conundrums. Unlike most RPGs (at least the few that I've played), in KOTOR your tasks are not all fetch-and-deliver. There are actual puzzles—some unique and some familiar. Unique ones include the numerous times you must "spike" a computer and disable this or that in a "dungeon;" the familiar includes a Towers of Hanoi game and some number sequences (although among these latter were a couple of sequences I'd not seen before).

It is obvious Knights of the Old Republic is a big-budget game, and this munificence was extended to the hiring of voice actors. Included in the closing credits were Ed Asner and Charity James, although I must confess I did not recognize either of their voices whilst I was playing. Music, too, is top-drawer, including snatches of the original Star Wars movie music.

You can play either a male or female character, and you can play evil or angelic or any degree in between. You get light points or dark points depending on the moral choices you make in certain situations. On the whole, the game plays out much the same no matter what direction you take. There are different endings depending on whether you embrace the dark or the light, and there are some different weapons and armor usable only by one or the other. I played as light; after a while I started wishing I had chosen dark instead. Sometimes it's good to be bad. Besides, the dark side gets better stuff.

I played the Xbox version. I've heard tell the PC version includes some additional material. Although the game played nearly flawlessly, I did hit one pretty big bug that entailed replaying an hour or so of the game, after doing something slightly different near the beginning of one of the dungeons (again, I use the word loosely; there are no actual dungeons in KOTOR).

Party members include three other Jedi, one of them being that snot Bastila (ooh, how I wished I could've reached into my TV and fattened her lip once or twice); a couple of robots, er, droids, I mean; a mercenary; that damned goody two-shoes Republic soldier Carth; and a big ol' hairy Wookie and his interspecies gal pal, a perky Twi'lek named Mission ("Twi'lek" means "Two Blue Snake Butts Growing out of Your Blue Head," I think). Most of them are weak. I wound up choosing the same two for almost every outing, that bitch Bastila and my favorite bad-ass humanoid droid, the stylishly metallic HK-47. Sometimes I was forced to do a mission by myself, and sometimes I could not choose these two characters (your party has a three-character maximum) for whatever reason and had to use a lesser character. Like that damned Carth. Actually, that damned Carth was a halfway decent buttkicker. I just did not like him much. No sirree Bob, not much at all.

All characters level up at the same rate, so even if you leave some behind on nearly every mission, when you do need them, their stats are there for you. The weak ones are still weak, though, so I guess all things are relative. I think part of the problem was that I put all of my weapon and armor upgrades into the characters that I used the most and then had nothing left over for the rest of 'em. I suppose I could've taken stuff back from the strong guys and given it to the weak guys to make them the new strong guys, but hey, I am always one to take the easy (read: lazy) choice. It comes with the Fat Chick territory.

Now for the bad stuff: the turret. The turret is the only negative thing I can come up with. Several times, you must man the despicable turret and shoot at enemy spacecraft. Even this would not be such a bad thing if it were not for the reverse controls. Whoever thunk up reverse controls ought to be strapped to a chair and forced to actually play something with said reverse controls. For those of you who have never been blessed with this curse, "reverse controls" means simply that you move the joystick up and your gun or what have you moves down. It doesn't sound very hard, and it probably isn't for most people, but that is one dichotomy my brain simply cannot accept. Anyway, while I did survive all of the turret-manning (the time limits are exceedingly generous), it was the one part of KOTOR that was not fun for me. I loathed the turret with every fiber of my being.

There are two or three other minigames in addition to the turret, but the rest of them are optional. In fact, I don't think you ever have to play the card game, Pazaak. You do have to play a racing game one time, but that first time there is a huge advantage built into the game and you'd be hard put to lose. There is also a boxing-ring type game near the beginning. You can win or lose money by playing any of these minigames, or you can skip them altogether, like me.

Knights of the Old Republic is fast-paced, linear, and consistently entertaining, and the goals are always clear. There are not very many side quests. I did almost all of them and the whole game still took me only around 50 hours, short by RPG standards. That suits me just fine, though, since that's about the longest I can maintain an interest in any one game.

I haven't played a game this long that was this much solid fun all the way through since Anachronox, and KOTOR is a helluva lot less buggy. I was sorry to finish Knights of the Old Republic, and I am pleased to give it our Gold Star with no reservations whatsoever. This was a nearly perfect gaming experience, at least by my standards. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Bioware
Publisher: LucasArts
Release Date: November 2003 (PC); July 2003 (Xbox)

Available for:  

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

System Requirements

100% DirectX 9.0b compatible computer
Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP
Intel PIII 1 GHz or AMD Athlon 1 GHz (1.6 GHz recommended)
128 MB RAM (Win98), 256 MB RAM (WinME/2000/XP) (512 MB recommended)
32 MB OpenGL 1.4 compatible PCI or AGP 3D hardware accelerator with hardware transform and lighting (T&L) capability (ATI Radeon 9200 or better, NVidia GeForce4 Ti or better recommended)
100% DirectX 9.0b compatible audio device
4X CD-ROM drive
Keyboard and mouse
DirectX 9.0b (included)
4 GB free hard drive space

Where to Find It

GoGamer PC 39.90; Xbox 46.90

Prices/links current as of 02/03/04
Links provided for informational purposes only. FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

For More Info, Visit: