I hate chris avelone so much. although it is funny that with a voiced protagonist and character animators breathing down his neck Chris finally learned to be concise. That or there was simply nothing in the setting that lent itself to a 20min socratic dialog on the nature of the Force and ethic between Mike and his handler. I am being facetious for the most part. The game still is a fascinating oddity: Chris Avelone and Obsidian at the time the standard bearers of C-RPG, taking a bite out of the forbiden fruit that ended up destroying Bioware. Dialog wheels, action oriented third person shooter and a pre-set and voiced protagonist. And yet you can still feel Mr Avelone grasping through this cursed canvas with his maximalist understanding of choices & consequences. Minor choices made hours ago and worlds across come back either to haunt or grace your playthrough. miriads of storyline grow or die by your hand. if only I knew what my hands were doing I would feel like a God but as it stands my fantasies regarding a giant chainsmoking former stasis officer will remain fantasies. I'm grasping in the dark to try and utter the right words but I do not now what I'll say and Mike is a psychopath that I only partly control and the seasoned government operative spend most of the game shooting a gun as well as I imagine I would considering I've never touched a firearm in my life. It is simply the worst of both worlds in a lot of regards but even after all of this I come back to it and I wrote this review in some kind of fuge state because the window popped-up and after navigating the soulcrushingly ugly and bare levels of KotoR 2 I suddenly realized I had some grievances to air if only to the void.
Bugs are a transient problem. After weeks of patches the game resolved most of the big ones and it was mostly smooth sailing when Act 4 finally launched correctly and I was able to continue with the story. But the problem mostly lies therein: The game takes a nosedive after you leave act 3 and even within. The main threat that was the cult of the final dawn gets hastily wrapped-up. Companions just get weirdly siloed from each other (spoilers ahead) Argenta admits killing [someone] during act 3 and Abelard, aside from a line during the confession itself, never comments on it ever again. Heinrix is basically nonplused by your open conflict with Calcazar. Ulfar supposedly has an axe to grind with him also but even in the final confrontation is not reacting at all. Even within their companion quests you find yourself disapointed. Pasqal goes through a seismic change in who he is supposed to be but there is absolutely no reaction to it even from himself. Argenta's personnal quest concludes on a weirdly short and unsatisfying mission that gives her a deathwish that is never reflected on ever again until the ending slideshow. Act 5 is a rushjob through necrons that are played up as a massive threat but are pretty unimpressive in gameplay terms and suffer from being dropped with zero forshadowing on the player. You basically get the plot explained to you by a complete stranger with no voiced line 20 minutes before the ending itself. The ending slideshow had the feeling of watching guy spinning plates, all of them shaking more and more as the show went on and finally crashing into each other in puzzling incoherence Technical bugs can be fixed but I feel there was suppsed to be more to the story but time/money ran out for what is still a fairly ambitious project. It is also weird that the management part is the driest of all of owlcat's games in the one game where we're basically a space CEO.
