STAR WARS™: Knights of the Old Republic

Hands down, one of the best RPGs available for PC (and Mac). BioWare, already renown for Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, took the Star Wars universe and did it justice; proving it could make for a damn fine game. Whether you're a Star Wars fan or a fan of the RPG genre, KOTOR is every bit worth owning. PROS: +Good amount of customization for protagonist and team members. +Choice between Light Side and Dark Side with every decision made within the story. +Huge, open-world exploration spanning multiple planets. +Non-linear story, from moral choices to side missions. +Fun mini-games, like Swoop racing and Pazaak (cards). +Endless REPLAY VALUE. CONS: -6th gen (PS2 era) graphics will annoy graphics snobs. -No multiplayer.

This game itself is a classic with an amazing story and compelling game-play. I could play this game over and over again without ever getting bored as there are multiple paths to take while playing. It is in fact, one of the best RPG games ever made. What makes this a tragedy of a game is that it is also the buggiest game I've ever played and the bugs are MAJOR and highly frequent. Quests get stuck, the game crashes constantly (and I mean constantly), every cutscene will close the game to desktop and reopening the game from the start bar will give a black screen, there's no option to skip these scenes (meaning alt+tab about 20-30 times before the game is visible), even the very opening game menu is bugged the same way cutscenes are and usually requires alt+tab several times to get it working, multiple graphic issues with shadows, and the list goes on and on and one (literally). If you check the forums on this site or do a google search, you'll see pages and pages of different game breaking glitches. Kudos to Gog for actually getting this terribly broken game to even install. I have the original CD and it crashed every time I tried to install it. All that said, if you have A LOT of patience in dealing with constant glitches in a badly coded game, you will find this to be possibly the best RPG ever made. I am toughing my way through the glitches (mainly the cutscenes between "chapters") because of how great this game is and how excited I am that someone finally actually got it running at all on Windows 10.

This game have a ridiculous amount of quest bugs that doesn't allow you to finish certain quests. The only way in order to fix it is to use a tool called KotOR Save Editor to modify the Booleans and Numerical values of the related quests, you have to Google to find the correct ones to modify. Other than that it's the game have a great story with lots of game hours and usually interesting dialogs.

Still holds up, I'd say 8/10. Only downsides are the start is slow, once you get your ship the game is a lot better. There are some bugs with AI during combat so might as well just play on Easy to avoid the frustration, and using Force Speed (turn off the graphic effect that makes you have blur while this is active!) to traverse maps faster but then having to wait on slower party members to catch up before changing maps can get tiring. I can see why I fanboyed over this game when younger, it's a ton of Star Wars fanservice with some DnD-lite (consolized DnD dice gameplay) to boot. It's another example of a game that would have been way better if it was PC exclusive though, if they could've done it Baldur's Gate style for the combat (top down designed for m&k control) a lot of the combat issues wouldn't exist and this would probably be a 10. The game also forced me into a Light Side ending due to one decision I made near the end of the game (which reads very much like a Dark Side decision), even though I had played the rest of the game up to that point as Dark Side. The game makes it clear near the end that Light Side is the canon playthrough. Don't bother using the restoration mod since it doesn't do a lot and introduces some bugs, one of which can put you in a deadend game if you don't have a backup save. No native widescreen but the fix is easy and can be found through Google (UniWS method, not FlawlessWidescreen).

KOTOR is really a hallmark of what Bioware is capable of. Even with the somewhat clunky controls and combat style, it still is playable and extremely enjoyable in the new generation era of games. The characters, story archs and in general the universe presented here really adds to our love of this franchise.