The game’s official forums are rife with complaints (from ATI users, especially) about game stability and framerate problems, and it looks like the developers – again – have a long patching job in front of them if they’re to get the game running decently. Some of the game’s other graphical issues seem to stem from just outright poor design however, such as the animation sets. My own character’s walking animation made him look like a stumbling drunkard, and his running animation wasn’t too much better. The brief segments from the original KOTOR requiring the player to don a space-suit and slowly walk around the outside of a station or ship are also back, except this time my character zoomed around the outer catwalks like some kind of hyper-fast-exercise junkie in a manner that looked nothing less than absolutely stupid. The original KOTOR’s animations were beautifully done, and given how the sequel is based on the same engine, I’m not sure if I understand why they changed some of these animations to look worse. Thanks to the complaints I’ve outlined though, KOTOR2 turned out to be a very hard game to get into at first simply because I was too busy dealing with stability problems to actually enjoy the experience.

It’s a damn good thing that this game provided such an increasingly immersive and entertaining experience the more I played it, because I was all set to write it off as a buggy, incomplete release that could have been easy contender for best RPG of 2005 (on the PC, anyways), but was marred due to numerous technical bugs that really are unacceptable on any level. However, once I finally found a few ways to work around these problems (the 4.2 Catalyst drivers and an INI file tweak I discovered – “Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1” under the “Graphical Options” part of swkotor2.ini, for the curious), I was finally able to begin enjoying the game’s true beauty and suddenly changed my opinion. KOTOR2’s storyline is just as good and epic as that of the first game’s, and this alone makes it well worth experiencing for any RPG fan, but add in the still-solid (if a little unbalanced) combat system and lots of fun little mini-games and side-quests, as well as a huge exploration factor and lots of dialogue choices, and it’s easy to see why Knights of the Old Republic 2 is a “must-have” title. I genuinely wish however that the game had been polished up into a more stable state before being released, because I know the plethora of bugs are going to drive away a lot of people (and almost did the same to me), which is a fate this game definitely does not deserve. Despite my fond words, I strongly recommend waiting word of a patch before picking the game up, or risk being alienated from the game before it has a chance to truly suck you in. I don’t know what happened to force this game into the market when it clearly needed at least another couple of weeks of fix-up time, but now that it’s here, all I can state is that KOTOR2 is a really good RPG, but only if you’re part of the lucky minority that can run the game with none of the huge technical problems everyone else is suffering from.