The force is not strong in this one. So ya, you see the score and think “heresy”, but unfortunately after multiple attempts at playing through this game I am just done. I played through the first game for the first time in 2024 and really loved it, even giving it my best RPG award of that year. I went into this title with high hopes from all the praise I’ve heard it get and that it’s made by Obsidian who are one of my favorite developers. And this game was pretty much the same story as Fallout New Vegas, where they were given limited time to make the game but many fans would argue they made a better game then original developers. But it just really didn’t click with me at all and I’ll explain why.
To start off, I did play with the restored content patch which is basically required for the game to function (but in my experience not play) better. Thankfully with this game having workshop support on Steam, it’s very easy to install this mod and other ones but I've heard it's pretty hit or miss on which ones will disable achievements and which ones don’t. Restored content did not in my experience. Visually, the game mostly reuses assets from the first game but it does look a tad bit better then the original owing to it getting a facelift update from Aspyr (but never the first game?).
To speak about the few things I did like, I liked that you can just be a jedi from the start of the game, picking from one of the 3 subclasses as opposed to the first game with you starting as a normal soldier and only becoming a jedi later. I also liked that you could pick whether your character from the previous game was male or female and whether they were good or bad, with it even being referenced in dialogue choices. The crafting system is expanded and much improved and they fixed the odds in Pazak so it’s actually a fun card game to play now. And ya that’s it.
The first game had some of I think Bioware’s best companions with characters like Canderous, Bastilla, Juhani and even everyone’s favorite HK47 (who does come back for this entry) so I was interested to see what Obsidian had for me here. Honestly though, I don’t think I’ve ever hated a companion cast as much as I do in this game. I’m being a bit harsh, as not all of them are bad per say but I just didn’t find any of them to be that interesting and some of them genuinely got on my nerves. Atton is your scoundrel guy that you meet at the start and the game really gives a lot of screen time to him but I just found him to be very whiny. He also has a “dark past” that the game teases you with and how he doesn’t want your character to find out, to which Kreia hilariously blackmails him in a long cutscene between the two of them. And I’m like “Guys I don’t care”, and then when they do reveal his past I was like “Oh really? That’s intere- I still don’t care”. Some were kinda cool like Visas Marr and there are 4 companions that you can only recruit based on certain factors like whether you're male or female and chose light or dark side. But I’m just like come on guys, the first game had such a great cast that felt like my fictional star wars family, but here I hate all of these people lol
That leads into the game’s choice and consequence because the companions do play a factor here. Going back to the Fallout example, I felt like there Obsidian was able to outclass Bethesda, as the latter has always favored a black and white morality to their choices whereas the former, implemented more morally grey choices like in New Vegas. The classic Fallout 3 vs New Vegas debate, which I won’t get into but I personally always preferred New Vegas. Anyway, I bring that up in the sense that with this game they were going up against Bioware who at this time, were still in their golden age, making phenomenal RPGs, and my point is I just think Bioware just did it better. In this game, you can of course choose to be good or evil but haha, this game will give you ♥♥♥♥ about it no matter which choices you make. Enter Kreia, who I briefly mentioned in the companion section but I am talking about her here because she infuriated the hell out of me. Fans I know like her because she’s a truly neutral character in that she is not really good or evil and is by all accounts your main companion since she shares a force connection with you like Bastila did in the previous game. Every time I made a decision she would lecture me, like when I gave money to a beggar (like many of us do in games) and she was like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”, and proceeds to give me this long lecture about how everyone must help themselves and me giving that beggar money, will cause other beggars to beat him up so they can take his money for themselves (they even show you a cutscene of this) and when she was finally done I remember my mouth was just agape in shock until I eventually was like “Lady, where the HELL do you get off? Like did you forget who the main character is? ME!” It's like the classic Fallout 4 meme where you make a choice and you get a notification like “Piper didn’t like that”, cut to Sam Jackson from Pulp Fiction, “I DIDN’T ASK YOU A DAMN THING!”. That was me every time I made a choice in this game only it wasn’t funny anymore and I was genuinely pissed off.
Couple that with the fact that it seemed like every time you get new companion like Atton or the Mandalorian guy later, they have to show you a cutscene of Kreia walking up to them and either threatening or blackmailing them into never leaving my side, and I’m shaking my head in the background just being like “Kreia, just the shut the hell up.”.
Otherwise, the main story didn’t connect with me that much either. You play as a Jedi with a dark past though it’s not Revan from the first game. And this dark past really did confuse me as you get flashbacks to your character being shunned by the jedi council because you helped Revan but they love to keep what you actually did from you for a long time. Like later in the game, you meet up with one of the old council members and she and your character have this whole debate over the past and I’m like “Uh hi, I’m here and I’m still lost. Or did everyone just forget that I’m the main character again?”. You also have multiple villains and sith lords hunting you as opposed to just having Malak from the first game, and their motivations are really unclear. Like I get there setting up a mystery for you to unravel but I just find the whole experience from a narrative perspective to be very tedious to sit through. Couple that with technical performance as you can see in a lot of the cutscenes that this game is unfinished, in how they are awkwardly presented a lot of the time, or the long unskippable scene of the big ship docking to the space station you start the game in. Plus the last point I’ll make is this game tends to get very glitchy and janky if you don’t do the planets in a specific order as I ran into issues further in my playthrough and later on they put you in some really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ combat encounters like having to do a boss fight with Atton solo or making you go into an enemy base and fight dozens of enemies at once by yourself. UGHHHHHHH! IT’S SO FRUSTRATING!
But ya, rant over. I hope one day the Kotor games do get remade as I’d love to replay the first game in higher resolution but also, if they remake this one, they can finally ship the finished product that we should have gotten in 2004.
