PC - Star Wars: Kinghts of the Old Republic

Format
PC
Publisher
Lucas Arts
Developer
BioWare
Country of origin
USA
Release date
11/18/2003

Star Wars: Kinghts of the Old Republic.

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
8th Aug 05

A short time ago in a galaxy called the Milky Way, a film was released. That film was called Star Wars, and it was generally regarded as rather good, as were the two sequels that followed shortly after. Then the creators fell to the dark side and gave the rights to many people to make video games based on these good movies to people who did not produce very good games. However all was not lost and the people were given a new hope (sorry!) and dreamed that others who loved these movies as much as they did would create games that were worthy of the name Star Wars.

Knights of the Old Republic is a Star Wars RPG from BioWare the people behind other highly regarded PC RPG’s such as the Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights games.

Set some 4000 years before the Star Wars movies themselves there’s no chance of you running into characters from the movies, which is rather disappointing, however this also means that it’s not restricted to stay in line with the films storylines making for a fresher experience from most Star Wars games. Several years ago the Republic entered into a war, two Jedi knights, Revan and Malak, emerged as heroes of the Republic during this war. After the war, they disappeared only to reappear a few years later with a huge battle fleet and having fallen to the dark side of the force, with Revan as the master and Malak as his apprentice. The republic still weak from the war could not combat this huge force, and a team of Jedi knights were sent to capture Revan. Malak seizing his chance fired on Revan’s ship destroying it, although the Jedi managed to escape.

You wake up on the Endar Spire which is under attack by the Sith army, here the game introduces you to the controls etc, and you escape on to Taris the planet below with another Republic soldier named Carth. On Taris you must search for Bastila a young Jedi who has mastered the art of battle meditation and escape the planet before the Sith find you. After this you begin to search for Star Maps that will lead you to the Star Forge believed to be a weapon found by Revan and Malak and the key to the Sith’s rise in power.

The main story seems fairly simple at first but there are quite a number of twists and turns throughout. As you travel the galaxy in search of the Star Maps, you’ll run in to a total of nine other characters that will join you. Each of these characters have there own personality and back-story, which if you investigate enough can lead to a number of side quests. There’s the ace-pilot but untrusting Carth, the slightly snobbish Bastila, a street-wise female Twi’lek and her Wookie companion, a beeping astro-mech droid, a assassin/protocol droid (who refers to people as “organic meat bags” and has a tendency for blasting things), a rather rough soldier and two other Jedi, one who’s a rather senile-ish old man and a female who had fallen to the dark side. Whenever these characters are in your party they will chip in with useful information and occasionally talk amongst themselves.

The gameplay is similar to RPG’s based on D&D, in fact anyone who’s played a copy of any other of BioWear’s aforementioned titles won’t feel to far from home. You begin by picking from one of three classes all that are better in certain areas, Rouge (Charisma, Intelligence), Soldier (Attack, Defence) or Scout (Agility, Speed) and wither you want to be male or female (which does affect some of the options in the game). From here you can allocate points to your attributes, then you move on to feats. feats vary, there are feats which will increase your ability with mêlée or ranged weapons, wither you are better with one or two, then there are useable feats such as “Sniper Shot” or “Flurry”, most of which can be improved as you level up. Also Jedi (and you when you become a Jedi later in the game) have force powers, which work in much the same way as feats but use up force points.

All the choices you make through the game will have an affect on you and your party, be good and kind and this will turn you towards the light side, be evil and mean to all you meet and you will turn to the dark side. Depending on the path you take in can affect who joins your party, how you deal with certain storylines and even effect the end of the game.

Battle is taken care of by computer generated dice rolls, but you can command your party to attack with feats, force powers and get them to heal themselves or others. Battle can be paused so that you can issue these commands which will queue up and then be executed when the game is unpaused. Sometimes it does feel as if the battle system is rather unfair as your enemies seem to be getting far too many hits in while you’re doing nothing to them despite being a reasonable level.

Graphically the game is not disappointing, the different planets all are as different as you would expect wither you’re on the city planet of Taris, the desert sea of Tatooine or the Wookie home planet Kashyyk. The character models look good, although there are far too many identical NPC’s on all the planets. Also the movie sequences of starships and planets are well done. Music wise there’s nothing that stands out, yes there’s a lot of music that was used in the Star Wars movies but it looses its effect when this is the umpteenth time you’ve heard it as background music in a video game. What original music there is fits nicely to battles or the locations where it’s used but isn’t anything special.

There are a few problems, firstly the game rarely helps you out, right at the beginning of the game your dumped on Taris and are not really given any idea of what direction to go in or where to find what you’re looking for. While you have a wide range of abilities from your party members, you’re probably going to stick to a few of them and only use the rest when the story requires it or when you need some of their skills which is rather infrequently. Technical problems may arise also, these have occurred on friends versions as well as mine; the default setting for the gamma correction is fairly low, so low you can’t see anything, normally this is fixable by just popping into the video options; however it resets after any movie sequence and this can cause problems. Also I’ve had the music of the game disappear altogether but then when going into the menu it’s started again, then goes when returning to the game. Normally you can skip speech by pressing the mouse button but occasionally this skips all the speech and can make you miss information that is important.

Despite these problems KotOR is an extremely enjoyable RPG and is well worth a look even if your not a big fan of Star Wars.

(the game is also avaliable on X-box)

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 8th Aug 05

PC Star Wars: Kinghts of the Old Republic Images