Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Member Review for the Xbox

The Good: Uses the Star Wars license for an original game, great combat system and leveling up is easy, the new conversation engine makes you decide the outcome, lots of different weapons and upgrades, great voice work

The Bad: Difficulty can really bring things down, items are too expensive to buy, graphics aren't anything special, constant loading is annoying

I've finally played KotOR after many years of hearing about it and I have to say its a wonderful game. Just because it's Star Wars doesn't mean it can be a good RPG. Bioware really went out on a limb here to bring the whole "choose the light or dark side thing". Conversations can steer your story by what selections you choose and depending on what they are you'll drift light or dark. The actual combat in this game though it pretty solid. You can choose from your SW weapons everyone knows. You fight like in a real time RPG game but the fighting is done for you, and all you do is select what actions to choose. The level up system is easy to follow and very useful. The story is very unique in a sense that there aren't any of the old SW characters in here. It's completely original and I'm glad about this. I also love how you can upgrade weapons and armor by finding upgrade items and this will give your weapons new attributes and power. What might turn some players off is the fact that the difficultly can be extremely unbalanced at times and the constant loading is ridiculous. The game's graphics are ok but nothing that pushes the Xbox too hard. You get to bring 2 different characters with you at a time and the game sports a transit map system where you can go back to your hideout or haven from where your at...the downfall is you can't do this when you are in a "dungeon" full of enemies. What really made this game frustrating was that all the items were so expensive and finding the money to get them was difficult and I died all the time. I never finished the game really since I got stuck about 25% through and couldn't get past it. If you like SW or are just an RPG fan you should pick this up and you won't be disappointed.