George Lucas has made some mistakes in the past, and while there are certainly some faults in the ragged history of the Star Wars universe, at least it mostly maintained its congruency. In the case of the third installment of the KoTOR series however, I cry foul.

You begin with an Interesting story about finding some alien technology called Mass Effect which enables faster than light travel among other things. This makes the Falcon look like a garbage scow in the Kessler run and helps humanity find a huge space station. The Republic moves to this giant space station and starts calling themselves the Council. You enter the scene as a well known soldier and are soon brought into the fold of the Jedi Order which have changed their name to the Specters and are tasked with saving the universe from the Sith who have been renamed to the Reapers who are being helped by the Trade Federation Battle Droids called the Geth. The tools you have at your disposal to achieve this are an array of guns and grenades and the trusty Force which has been renamed to Biotics (which has been renamed before). You can see already that the frequency of changes made is already weakening the entire Star Wars mythos.

Now that I have that off of my chest, on to the good. The plot is engaging for all of its faults and the graphics are amazing. It is especially enjoyable to engage in conversation which offers a variety of “tones” that you can use in choice menus to change an NPC’s reaction to you. I was often afraid of choosing the more confrontational tones, but found that it was hard to make a wrong decision and this really served to change your reputation of “paragon” and “renegade” which opens certain skill options for you and thus more conversation options. This is different from the previous KoTOR system where doing something bad reduced how good you were; in this system you get the best of both worlds. There is a bit of a minigame where you overcome electronic encryption and door locks by playing Simon Says and I could see how this might be interpreted as a bad door locking scheme, but I was able to see it as a difficulty rating of applying a skill rather than a literal translation. Combat has moved from the turn based system and is now real time restricted by weapon overheating. The way the context of character levels are maintained is the extreme effect of skills on combat effectiveness. This is a welcome upgrade for a realistic feel. One of the coolest aspects is the MAKO. This is a planet rover with an attitude. It brings me back to days of playing Star Control II, only with the car from Aliens instead of a remote control buggy. Awesome!

In the end, the game delivers an open ending, suggesting even more sequels and I was not disappointed in the least. I gladly await the continuation of the KoTOR series and I hope it never strays in its superior game play as time goes on.

Great to get back into one of the best RPG series’ in gaming history	Cannot jump over a 10″ box
The voice acting and dialog is top notch. I never hurried a single line of new dialog as I played	Serious drift from the Star Wars canon
Alien lesbian sex scene!	No freaking lightsabers?!?

-Groggy