BioWare, the developer of the game, was smart enough (or rich enough) to hire people to do nothing more than write dialogue, and the quality shows. Better still, KOTOR is extremely well written, and that helps familiar plots and plot devices (the main quest in the game involves finding five pieces of something) seem new and refreshing. For example, the Jedi Knight you hook up with at the beginning of the game looks and sounds like Elizabeth Hurley rather than Alec Guinness, which is good from an eye-candy perspective if nothing else. Then, over the rest of the game, you have to try and stop a masked bad guy and destroy a powerful space station.Yes, KOTOR has some weird parallels with the first Star Wars movie, but other than the plot outlines being roughly the same, KOTOR is all new. Then you discover you have some affinity with the Force. Then you escape from the world on a smuggler’s spaceship. You flee the ship in an escape pod and land on an alien world. You start out on a small ship that is boarded by the bad guys. The game takes place some 4,000 years before the Star Wars movies, meaning all of the characters involved are new, but see if this sounds familiar. It’s easily the best game of the year, and it’s the best role-playing game since Baldur’s Gate II in 2000.In KOTOR you play a young soldier in the Republic army. Excluding KOTOR, the highest score I’ve given any game this year is 84%, and the highest score I’ve given any game in the three years I’ve worked at Game Over is 92%. Well, it is, but before you wander off to read Rorschach’s latest blog, let me try to put the score into some perspective. I’m bringing this up here because you might see my score of 93% for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (which I’ll just call KOTOR from now on), and decide this is just going to be another review praising the heck out of the game. That way readers would have to at least scroll through the text if not actually read it.
If you asked the reviewers, they’d probably prefer the score to go at the bottom of the page. That’s because it’s displayed so prominently above the review text. The first thing most readers notice about a Game Over review is the score. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic review