Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - Sith Lords (Xbox)

The companions accompanying you this time around are a more diverse and interesting bunch of personalities, often with agendas of their own. Weapons, upgrades and supplies can all be created with the new workbench facility and lightsabers are infinitely more customisable than before. The ability to influence your companions Force orientation is very welcome (something that FELT like it should have been in the first game, but wasnt). The music is also excellent. The plot is excellent, deeper than before but drawing on the previous story. The new Sith lords are an intriguing bunch, mysterious and rather chilling (unlike Malak who was imposing but relatively unscary).

There are, however, some downsides to this game. The same game engine is used as before which is a pity as I can't help but think that the xbox is capable of more. It is also a very buggy game, characters fail to attack enemies right in front of them and sometimes run off in the opposite direction! Unlike Kotor 1 the game rarely autosaves which can make unexpected deaths VERY galling.

Although I was very keen on the plot, events towards the end snowball together very quickly which curtails your options in terms of partnering various characters together. I have played the game through twice as both a sith and a jedi and have not managed to get the full story out of all the character's in my team by the end of play. This is fine if you have bags of time to play through again but seeing as it takes around 30 hours from beginning to end it is rather frustrating.

There are relatively few sith artificats or new suits of armour and Obsidian seem to be reluctant to add new ones in, very dissapointing. Anyone who got a kick out of creating good/bad star forge robes in the orifginal kotor will find no such surprises here.

Weapon selection is now much faster thanks to the handy option of a second selectable weapon set. The downside being that it gets in the way of selecting you which type of attack you pick on occasion. Another button on the panel, just for that, would have been helpful. More force powers new moves would have been great. How about an escape move e.g escaping backflips, light saber speed draws (iai-jutsu style for the martial artisits out there!) lightsaber feints (Obi Wan in Episode 4 against Vader).

It would be great if you could travel between locations on a hover bike (think darth maul in episode 1 - it would need a better game engine, maybe on xbox 2!) There is still a lot of tooing and froing on foot, despite Obsidian cutting down on journey time.

Overall a very good game but also something of a missed opportunity. The next Kotor will need to have a new graphics engine, more variety in opponents (just how many sith assasins can anyone really take?) and a freer third act. It is also qwuestionable how often you can have a jedi losing their memories and/or their powers only to build them up again.

Perhaps kotor 3 should take a leaf out of fable's book and mature a character from birth and adolescence to adulthood Anakin style. The mysterious jedi routine will lose its allure in a third Kotor. That said if they make the above changes I would be more than happy to get a copy.