Star Wars: KotOR II Reviews
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The smarter breed of reader will by now have grasped one of the major problems with KOTOR2. The fact that there was a full paragraph devoted to "You can switch weapons on one command" should imply this isn't exactly Brave New World territory. This is very much a slightly improved version of KOTOR taken out for another spin, with another plot slid into the engine. Partially it underlines how much it's what you choose to do with an engine that matters rather than the engine itself - after all, Half-life 2 and Vampire: Bloodlines both rest on the same technical base. This feels a very different beast to the original KOTOR purely because the plot Obsidian has chosen to fire through the filter. It's far more grey; more Empire Strikes Back than Star Wars to choose an apposite example - including the somewhat open conclusion. Equally, the planetary set-pieces are generally better developed and paced, referencing everything including pop-culture (Seven Samurai-esque defend-villages-on-Dantoonie, for example) with many nods towards the original.
And the second is at Just RPG with an overall score of 85%:
By the time the credits roll, your character is adrift in any number of ways, and quite a few friends and allies are lost, dead, or in trouble. You're left wondering what just happened, and what's going to happen.and you're not entirely happy about it. In this, the game succeeds at being the Empire Strikes Back to its predecessor's New Hope. It's not easy to love, but it's worth playing.
