STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II - The Sith Lords™

Great game does not work well with the steam deck, about 20+ hours in and can no longer travel to other planets and cannot find a fix :(

Authentic Star Wars RPG! Go dark side, go light side. Too much fun and amazing storyline.

Praise: A masterpiece of adventure and atmosphere. Its open-world exploration, stunning visuals, and memorable characters are unmatched in the genre. Condemnation: The game suffers from a frustrating, buggy combat system (had to restart my playthrough a few times because of Bugs) Overall: A visually stunning but mechanically flawed title that is highly recommended for fans of open-world games despite its flaws. 10/10

The best story in a Star Wars game. Probably the best Star Wars game ever made. You play an exiled jedi who regains their power, defends the republic from shadowy sith conspirators, and are forced with morally gray decisions. At its heart, it's a Star Wars RPG. You can lean on being a jedi, or fight your enemies with the power of the dark side. Like the first game, you travel with a diverse band of characters, each with their own mission lines and inter-party relations. Turn-based combat might not be for everyone, but this is a worthy Star Wars experience.

These are the types of games that used to show up in stores for twenty bucks just telling you "Here's a ten to twenty hour experience, we hope you enjoy it!” and everyone moved on with their lives. Modern games just seem to want to lock you in with live services to keep you playing daily/weekly quests and eyeballing those 2.99 costume packs day in and out, which is why I’ve been on such a retro kick lately. If you ignore most of the side quests, the first Mass Effect can effectively be speed run in about six hours, which I used to do just to get a save file with specific decisions. Still as a result of the change in design philosophies I simply don’t have as much to say on them. KotoR 1 and 2 are loosely designed on a DnD 3.5e format, so in a way I could almost describe these games as a prototype for a Baldur’s Gate 3 type situation. However I’d almost find this system nearly unnecessary because you don’t really see the dice rolls. One of my biggest priorities is increasing my To-Hit values but I never have any concept of what I’m competing against, as in I don’t know what my enemy’s armor classes ever are. Throughout playing the first game, my chances to hit and miss seem moderately arbitrary. I can annihilate my way through gang members but one planet later I’m getting cleaned up in a restart loop against tusken raiders. And they don’t even have energy shields. So it feels like giving me all the numbers is kind of pointless and things should have been worded more vaguely if there’s no real feedback. Don’t worry, that’s the end of my copy/paste of my Kotor1 review. Other than Dark Side options still erring on the side of just being a ♥♥♥♥ to people, they’re weaved more often in dialog. It’s more along the lines of commanding obedience from your teammates and less stabbing some chick for her fifty credits but oh don’t worry, that’s still present. I just feel as though the first thing is more narratively appropriate and even more lore friendly for how someone can succumb to the dark side. And it’s still the only way we can be a cool pale goth chick. As much as I loved the first game and did a ton of replays to the point where I've developed a sort of muscle memory on where certain dialog trees can go… I have almost no memory of the second game at all. If memory serves I think I must have played through it at most, once. I think Kotor2 entered my life at a point where my gaming interests were more varied. I’m not sure what was going on in my life in the 2004-2007 era when this game popped up for me but it was probably an MMO like Guild Wars or Warcraft. And those are akin to having a part time job in their own right so there’s something about Kotor2 that didn’t keep my attention as much as the first game did. By and large I feel as though Kotor2 is a superior game. The first had a good twist and introduced really good lore that other entries like the MMO, SWTOR, explore in further detail. Even from my copy/paste from earlier I think the to-hit chances were tweaked. We level up faster here because of a higher level cap and new prestige classes so as I dump every feat into my to-hit chances as I can, I find myself actually hitting my enemies with greater reliance. I still wonder how I’m missing enemies with my +18 to hit Lightsaber but once again. I guess droids are just built Ford Tough. The story also feels more like a DnD or tabletop adventure. The first game just slaps you with the amnesia stick and the story is just “go go go we gotta go before the sith go go go”. This game even starts similarly, with you knocked out on a ship. After your pet droid repairs enough of the systems to find the ship to a mining colony where things got properly bonkers, it’s up to you to figure out the mystery of the mining colony, deal with your team’s disagreements before they shoot at each other, and come to some revelations about yourself and make decisions about what to do about it. I can almost see a spectral dungeonmaster pulling the strings and dropping story hints. Like a single player DnD session. What has also changed from the first game is the whole teammate influence mechanic, which I’ve yet to be able to discern. For the most part I just keep losing influence because everyone you pick up doesn’t like my Darksider (with the exception of HK-47, but you can’t train him to be a Jedi so who cares). Yet at some point I can’t define, Atton suddenly started drowning in positive influence as I started gunning down civilians in their apartments on Nar Shadaa with lines like “Good thing we got to them before they did something to us.” I’m not sure where he started getting that impression, but the story does make a hint that we can just kind of override our team’s will. Really cutting close to the creepiness of Jade Empire’s dark path… And that’s good. We should not be incentivized to become murderhobo lunatics in games like this… But I also really like being a pale goth chick. Civilians in that upcoming Fable game shall tremble before me and my thigh-highs. Ultimately this game was made in an age where being a sequel meant something. It took what was there first and expanded pretty much every mechanic that matters. There’s more loot, more logical Dark/Light side opportunities, more incentive to bother talking to your teammates, and the way the game feels I don’t feel automatically compelled to just have a game-breaking all-Jedi team. It’s an improvement on all counts, but they still have a different “vibe” that comes down to the writing. So that will be entirely up to you.

STAR WARS Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords to jeden z najlepszych RPG osadzonych w uniwersum Gwiezdnych Wojen i znacznie mroczniejsza kontynuacja pierwszego KOTOR-a. Wcielamy się w Wygnanego Jedi i trafiamy do galaktyki wyniszczonej wojną, w której Zakon Jedi praktycznie przestał istnieć. Historia koncentruje się na Mocy, konsekwencjach naszych decyzji oraz znacznie bardziej niejednoznacznym konflikcie pomiędzy jasną i ciemną stroną. Największą siłą gry są fabuła, dialogi i towarzysze. Kreia jest jedną z najlepiej napisanych postaci w całym uniwersum Star Wars, a rozmowy z nią potrafią całkowicie podważyć klasyczne spojrzenie na Jedi i Sithów. System walki opiera się na zasadach RPG znanych z pierwszej części – rozwijamy postać, zdobywamy nowe moce, wybieramy wyposażenie i budujemy własną drużynę. Technicznie gra mocno pokazuje swój wiek, a końcówka została wyraźnie przyspieszona przez problemy podczas produkcji. Warto grać z The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, który przywraca sporą część wyciętej zawartości. Mroczny, dojrzały i znakomicie napisany RPG, który pokazuje Gwiezdne Wojny z zupełnie innej strony. Zdecydowanie polecam.

Toguapo ahi con la fuerza y tal

A fine addition to my collection