It's a CRPG. It's a tabletop, pencil-and-paper RPG in video game form. Like D&D. With the slow, initiative/turn based combat, and the % chance to hit, and those percentages are frustratingly low at the beginning of the game. If you like those, this seems like a pretty good one. Comes with lots of goodies. Seems like quite a bit of passion went into making this game. I like the dialog, the writing. The voice acting was pretty good too. The game can be pretty funny sometimes. I lost an entire party to underestimating a pack of giant mutated rabbits, and had to start the game over. I got about 3 hours into it, and it's just not for me. I can't really get into the combat, in particular. I couldn't really point at anything "bad" about the combat, I just don't like it. It is what it is - turn based strategy game combat. I just couldn't get into wasting a whole turn with attacks that missed, wait for everyone else to get a turn, and missing all my attacks on the next turn, too. At 65% chance to hit, two attacks per turn, you have a 17% chance of missing 4 attacks in a row, so that wasn't even that unlikely! I know I was near the beginning of the game and my rangers weren't exactly badasses yet, I just... don't like that type of combat.
This is one of those games I think are too old to be much fun. When I first played back in the early 2000s, sure! But the franchise has just come too far for this original entry to be much fun. No auto-saves! I got about an hour and a half in my first time, didn't even think about saving. I quickly learned to auto-save just about constantly. Graphics, not bad. It has a 2x render mode (doubled 480p = 960p) It works pretty well in full screen HD resolutions. Even lets you see more of the play space at once. Alt-tabbing sometimes turned the screen black. Easy enough to clear - just pause and un-pause did it for me. Controls are clunky. Read the manual, keep the reference card handy. Combat never managed to be appealing. Awkward, unsatisfying turn-based combat. I wouldn't want to see this remastered. Completely remade, maybe.
about 8 hours in, I feel like I haven't gotten very far. Most of the time was spent back-tracking, or fighting the uncooperative (but interesting) spell casting system, where you draw runes with your mouse. It's very finicky. I can tell there's a bit more to see. There's an alchemy system I can't use yet so ingredients were just taking up space in my inventory. There's a cooking system I kinda like. Flour, water. Bread and pies. Other than that, it's a couple different cooked meats and a few vegetables I could only eat raw, but it's fun putting the food next to a fire and watching it cook. Not bad for such an old game. The combat system is pretty bad. Really slow and awkward. Enemies like to run away when they have low health, dragging the fight on longer. There's a stealth system? The only chance I had to use it was in an enemy fort and it was too easy to get spotted and watch them run off to let the whole camp know. There's a weird charm to the character models and facial animations. Like a bad foreign language dub, the mouths do not match what you hear. My favorite is speaking to a troll who moves his jaw repeatedly to say, "Raaaaaaaaaah" If you like the price, I say go for it. But I don't really have anything to say to recommend this game. It's an old janky mess and I didn't have a whole lot of fun in 8 hours.
I've put 40 hours into this game now. 20 when it first came out, and 20 just recently - nearly 8 months after release. I think this game is fundamentally incomplete. What we were promised just isn't there. A lot of that 40 hours feels padded. Getting around feels like a chore. In a world of drop boxes and money transfers and video calls, I feel like I shouldn't have to travel across town so often to advance quests. It's shallow. It doesn't feel alive. If you look a little closer, it barely even APPEARS alive. Massive buildings you can only visit 2 or 3 floors in, filled with NPCs doing nothing. Vendors standing in kiosks, asking you what your problem is instead of selling you stuff. Food joints, even mentioned by name (Buck-a-Slice pizza?) exist as facades. You can't go in. You can't buy the pizza. Not that you need to. Ample food and drink available on the ground for free. I found Trauma Team taking care of a car crash, and got excited. I pulled over and watched. They did NOTHING. Everyone was in an animation loop, looking busy and doing nothing. Arcades full of noise. The NPCs are just sitting in chairs. Staring at the machines. YOU can't even play the games. Cops guarding sectioned-off areas. Doing nothing. Gave me a wanted level for driving by. The skill trees were mostly boring. The few fun ones look like they take quite a while to get to, and the skills to buy on the way don't make it enticing. +% here, +% there. Cooldown reduction this, stamina recharge that. I can tell the game was mismanaged. Yes, COVID and working from home was a huge problem. But, they said they'll release it when it's done. It would have been painful, but they should have taken back the release date and made us wait until 2022 or later. But, I'm getting off-topic. It's a marvel of modern video game technology. It's not a good game.
Not on PC. The game was designed for PlayStation 2 and its controller. Namely, the pressure sensitive buttons which were used for several different things. I couldn't stand the PC control scheme, I just got out my old PS3 and MGS Legacy Collection and played it that way.
This game IS a bit old and is pretty dang clunky. Z and C are strafing left and right, whereas A and D rotate the camera, because that's how some games used to be! It's gonna take a little work to get it to run the way you want, otherwise it runs in 4:3, I think. Also beware of high frame rates. It's "real time with pause" but also turn-based. You can pause whenever, switch to anybody in your party, and add or delete moves/powers from their queue (up to 4 moves ahead) and it's based on Dungeons and Dragons under the hood. Those familiar with 3.5e should notice it - attributes, feats, skills. You can use one lightsaber, two, or a double-bladed. Decent color choices, and two slots to put secondary crystals to add more neat stuff to your saber. Tons of dark, neutral, and light side powers to learn. Story is great. Side quests range from ughhhh to really good. Good amount of puzzles and problems to solve. I actually had to use a notebook to keep track and figure out some of them. But I really really liked the main story and it's partially why I don't like a lot of newer Star Wars stuff - I think the writing just isn't as good as it is in this game. I can't even tell you how many times I've played it. Several times on the original Xbox and a couple more times when I built my first computer, and I'm playing it again today in 2020, nearly 17 years after it came out. I wholeheartedly recommend this... not to everybody but like. Do you like DnD-style RPGs with Star Wars flavoring? Do you want to explore Star Wars a few thousand years before Sidious' Empire? Go on, then! And may the Force be with you.
I can't really speak for the story, I couldn't put up with this game long enough to really find out. It's one of those ones that's a little too old. Control, UI, general mechanics... I just couldn't do it.
