STAR WARS™ - Knights of the Old Republic™
63 hour of playtime, no achievements
★★★☆☆
The Good: The story is pretty good so I understand why this game gets a lot of love. Sadly reading the wiki to avoid some game bugs spoiled a major plot point for me.
The Bad: The combat is really bad and tends to lean towards the difficult side which makes the game unfun to play at times. Difficulty seems to spike up and down at random.
The Ugly: Several bugs that break minor things in the game, these seem like things that could easily be fixed but no one bothered. Also the card game feels like it’s rigged (in favor of the opponent) instead of being truly randomized.
Overall I liked the game, though it tends to be a bit long and combat can be quite annoying as well as trying to avoid certain dialogue/quest breaking bugs.
TL;DR Good story, but bad and antiquated gameplay, with several bugs that can break some minor things. Don’t read the wiki at all if you don’t want to spoil the story.
Is there an Easy difficulty setting? I’ve always wanted to play KOTOR 1&2 for the story and Star Wars immersion, but I had a hard enough time with Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy on Easy. I’m sure I suck at these games.
I’m not sure actually, I don’t think so but it’s been a while since I completed it. Yeah, the older Star Wars games tend to be a bit tedious, and this one has a pretty clunky combat system until you get used to it and realize which skills/weapons are useful. It’s not that bad and it’s mostly the beginning that’s harder because you’re so weak and certain battles that spike the difficult up a lot out of nowhere. Probably wouldn’t recommend this game to you, maybe you can use cheats or mods or something if you really want to play this.
I didn’t find the KOTOR’s to be any more difficult than any other RPG back then, but I can definitely see that it didn’t age well.
It does kind of feel like that “old school” difficulty, but I’m not sure I’ve played many other RPGs of that era. The combat system hasn’t aged well at all, but the rest is ok-ish.
Honestly, it’s just d20 which has been phased out in favor of homebrew rulesets RPGs tend to use. It was all the craze back in the day when licensed games were hot.
Combat.
Throws lightning storm constantly to kill everyone in 3s
I do admit I’ve beaten KOTOR 1 and 2 like 15 times each. But apart from few tights spots it’s of average difficulty. I’d say I have biggest problem with rakghouls at the beginning of KOTOR1 due to low level and lack of abilities. Rest is easy or average. It’s only that some abilities are pointless, like IMO all buffs from light side abilities aren’t necessary apart from heal and rush of speed. And like lightsaber throw deals pitiful amount of damage when we compare it to how long it’s animation is and how much lightning storm deals.
If you’d play in KOTOR 2 don’t forget about TRCM it fixes a lot of bugs. Still it adds 2 really tough combat sequences. And last fight with game antagonist is really hard, I had to repeat it few times in each playthrough.
Well I played pure light side so no murdering light storm for me. As you said the first part of the game is pretty tough, especially for a first play through like myself and I was also going for a 5/15 build which didn’t help, the rest is ok-ish for the most part except for certain difficulty spikes out of no where. I remember the two Terentateks in the Sith temple which were very hard and one specific group of sand people with a holy warrior which was much harder than any of the other sand people. It’s mostly those weird difficulty spikes that annoyed me. Also not having any idea what skills/weapons are or aren’t useful. Most buffs for lightside are pretty useless and last way too short, I noticed that too. Tried lightsaber throw once or twice, but I agree with you, it mostly just looked cool.
I was lucky enough to get this game from tremor games when it was bundled, still looking for a decent sale or bundle for the second one. But I did enjoy the game despite it’s clunky combat.
Yeah, I’d be really annoyed when trying to play as pure LS with only LS powers. They are so bad D:
There is power penalty for using power from opposite side. But on high levels with decent amount of force points (I always played as melee/force mix, never pure lightsaber or force specialization) it’s not really noticeable. But on low levels it’s enough to cast simple lightning twice to deplete whole force meter.
I just though that I’d kill enemies either way as it’s not avoidable. So better to kill them fast than rely on lightsaber attacks with some buffs.
So now I do get why you don’t like fight ;P I’d share your opinion playing as pure LS.
Well the whole combat system was a bit weird so I never bothered with dark side powers since that was also confusing, though I get it now. I also combined both melee and force, but still mostly relied on melee and only used force powers to heal, shield and zap droids (which is ok to do as a light side character). It is kind of strange how only Sith use lightning to kill people, yet killing (the right) people in itself isn’t bad. The lightsaber is quite frustrating simply because of how much it misses even while fully upgraded.