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blufive[Official site. Warning: plays music at you]
4000 years before the Galactic Empire, the forces of the Sith, led by Darth Malak, are locked in combat with the Republic, and winning. Cue much romping around the Old Republic waving blasters, bowcasters and/or lightsabers.
In so many ways, this is not my sort of game. It's a computer based "Role Playing" Game (not that I play the real thing nowadays). Large parts of the game are what I would call (in my LRP days) a mosh-fest. Hit the bad guys till they fall over, grab the treasure, exchange for money. Find the Plot Token, carry to significant location/NPC. Rinse, Repeat.
It's based on what I believe is now known as the D20 system, but which I always think of as the D&D system[1], and goes to considerable lengths to expose the underlying game mechanics to the player. Personally, this is a drawback, as I'm not remotely familiar with the system; as a consequence, most of the decisions I made when levelling up early in the game turned out to be pretty bad, as I had a lousy idea of what stats were relevant to what gameplay elements. As a result, by mid-game, at "normal" difficulty, combat was HARD, with mundane enemies pounding me at practically every turn.
Luckily, the game let me turn the difficulty down to easy (an option which is distressingly rare). At which point it got ludicrously easy, with my party swatting hordes aside with ease. Ho hum. [insert rant about having more difficulty levels than Comical-Normal-HardBastard]
BUT. Despite all that, I played it all the way through. Believe me, that's a big deal - if nothing else, this game has a fair quantity of content.
The plot is pretty good (even if I saw the much-vaunted twist from a mile away) and generally well told. The game practically oozes atmosphere.
A few minor nits: some of the branching conversations could do with some extra work. More than once, I selected an option, only to discover that the response I'd chosen was sarcastic rather than sincere, giving exactly the opposite effect to what I'd intended. It's a bit of a system hog for those on older machines - my Athlon 1900+ with cheap 64Mb GeForce 4 had to make do with low-to-middling graphics settings, and stuttered occasionally. For a supposedly non-reflex-oriented game, the combat interface demands an awful lot of rapid, precise, mouse-clicking.
After all that ranting, I'll simply say that, even though this isn't my sort of game, I'm seriously contemplating playing it again, just to explore some of the sub-quests I missed or messed up first time around. So they must be doing something right.
[1]Apologies to any professional RPG writers who may be reading this if I've bolloxed up the terminology.
4000 years before the Galactic Empire, the forces of the Sith, led by Darth Malak, are locked in combat with the Republic, and winning. Cue much romping around the Old Republic waving blasters, bowcasters and/or lightsabers.
In so many ways, this is not my sort of game. It's a computer based "Role Playing" Game (not that I play the real thing nowadays). Large parts of the game are what I would call (in my LRP days) a mosh-fest. Hit the bad guys till they fall over, grab the treasure, exchange for money. Find the Plot Token, carry to significant location/NPC. Rinse, Repeat.
It's based on what I believe is now known as the D20 system, but which I always think of as the D&D system[1], and goes to considerable lengths to expose the underlying game mechanics to the player. Personally, this is a drawback, as I'm not remotely familiar with the system; as a consequence, most of the decisions I made when levelling up early in the game turned out to be pretty bad, as I had a lousy idea of what stats were relevant to what gameplay elements. As a result, by mid-game, at "normal" difficulty, combat was HARD, with mundane enemies pounding me at practically every turn.
Luckily, the game let me turn the difficulty down to easy (an option which is distressingly rare). At which point it got ludicrously easy, with my party swatting hordes aside with ease. Ho hum. [insert rant about having more difficulty levels than Comical-Normal-HardBastard]
BUT. Despite all that, I played it all the way through. Believe me, that's a big deal - if nothing else, this game has a fair quantity of content.
The plot is pretty good (even if I saw the much-vaunted twist from a mile away) and generally well told. The game practically oozes atmosphere.
A few minor nits: some of the branching conversations could do with some extra work. More than once, I selected an option, only to discover that the response I'd chosen was sarcastic rather than sincere, giving exactly the opposite effect to what I'd intended. It's a bit of a system hog for those on older machines - my Athlon 1900+ with cheap 64Mb GeForce 4 had to make do with low-to-middling graphics settings, and stuttered occasionally. For a supposedly non-reflex-oriented game, the combat interface demands an awful lot of rapid, precise, mouse-clicking.
After all that ranting, I'll simply say that, even though this isn't my sort of game, I'm seriously contemplating playing it again, just to explore some of the sub-quests I missed or messed up first time around. So they must be doing something right.
[1]Apologies to any professional RPG writers who may be reading this if I've bolloxed up the terminology.