I felt it was about time I tried my hand reviewing a game and as a die-hard Star Wars fan what could be more appropriate than Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords? Let’s just call it KOTOR2 for short!

Review: KOTOR II: The Sith Lords (PC) 

KOTOR2 is set some 4,000 years before the movies and four years after the original ground breaking Knights Of The Old Republic game. Fortunately, you don’t need to have played the original KOTOR game to understand what’s happening in KOTOR2. In KOTOR2, the game concentrates on the Sith attempts to eradicate the remaining Jedi Knights after most were killed in the original KOTOR. As one on the path of the Jedi, your main objective is to call a halt to the Sith plans. Fortunately this task becomes easier once you’ve managed to successfully build a light-saber and learnt the ways of the Jedi.

Before we look at the game, it might be worth taking a quick look at the recommendations on hardware.

If your machine is less than two years old, you shouldn’t have any problems with the games requirements. Whilst it’s less graphically demanding than Doom 3 or Half Life 2, you’ll still need a graphics card with 128Mb of RAM.

KOTOR2 was meant to have steered away from some of the RPG elements of its predecessor and moved towards the real-time action of Republic Commando. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Whenever the computer spots a new enemy on-screen it pauses the action and highlights the enemy in a bright red cross-hair and asks you to indicate how you’d like to attack them. This hardly helps the real-time action and feels a bit more like Final Fantasy than Star Wars! On the other hand, if you’re a lover of games that require you to plan out your actions this will probably appeal to you more than straight out action.

In an age where many games are touting multiplayer action KOTOR2 perhaps stands out as staying away from such frenzied action. Instead there’s a fairly strong level of non-linearity in the game and this helps to keep the single player game interesting. Still, it’s hard to see how multiplayer would have been implemented given the ‘pause-time’ when you make your choices.

Despite the fact there’s only around ten standard weapons, the ability to upgrade various elements of those weapons, such as accuracy or damage, helps to contribute to the feeling there’s more. The same goes for the armour that you can obtain – there are various upgrades to increase the ability of the armour.

The ability to play the game from the perspective of any of the characters in your party gives a major advantage to those who don’t focus on an individual. You can choose the most appropriate member of your party to perform a task even if it’s choosing between Kiera opening doors or a droid unlocking them. Your party members can do any of the tasks you order them to.