Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords

Game reviews 126 Page 4 of 5 Published by

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Graphics and Sound
KOTOR IIs graphics engine remains largely unaltered from the original. While in 2003, the graphics were really quite nice, they are starting to show their limits, especially now we have all been spoiled with the likes of Half Life 2, Far Cry, Doom 3 and even Chronicles of Riddick. Many areas employ low-resolution textures that are far more obvious than in the first game just walk up to the Ebon Hawk for an example. Some levels have areas that just seem rather bland and devoid of any great detail. While this doesnt necessarily impact on game play, it would have been nice to see Obsidian giving the engine at least a minor facelift and bringing the game world a little more to life although this could be down to the fact its been ported over from the X-box. They have however, spruced up some of the effects, such as force powers. Force lightning still looks pretty impressive, and there are some nice environmental effects such as smoke and mist. Lip-syncing is also present and nicely done - an important aspect for such a large RPG, with a lot of time spent interacting with NPCs. Each planet is divided up into different areas. These seem to vary in size, some are relatively large (although none of them could be described as huge), while others are more claustrophobic. Some missions spread themselves across more than one area, and having to continually load into different areas to complete them can be a little annoyance particularly if you are on a lower spec machine with longer load times. No doubt this too is due to the games console origin.

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While the graphics engine is ageing, there are still some nice environmental effects effects

When it comes to performance, I had no real issues with the game in terms of bugs after the patch was released. Before this, I did experience the odd crash to desktop, so I would certainly recommend installing it. This game does not support SLI, so for the majority of the time I was running on a single 6800Ultra/AMD FX-55 system. This stormed through the game at 1280x1024 with 16xaf and 4xaa, with butter-smooth frame rates. Upping the AA to 8x proved a little too much though. On lower spec machines you would have to sacrifice one or two things however. I ran it on an ATI Radeon 9600XT/ Athlon XP 2500+ system, and while you could play the game it meant sacrificing the levels of AA and AF and dropping down to a resolution of 1024x768 to make it truly playable in all circumstances. Some of the effects seem to be particular performance killers, particularly smoke and mist effects, where you see otherwise reasonable frame rates plummet. Shadow settings also have a huge impact on FPS, particularly soft shadowing, which can drop your frame rate by around 20fps, so if you have a particularly ageing GPU, this maybe something you have to consider sacrificing. On the whole though, the game performs well, as you would expect on an older graphics engine.

Sound effects in a Star Wars game are pretty much a fore told story, with all the classic weapon effects in place and present. Lightsabers have that familiar hum, Blaster shots are instantly recognisable, and the low rumbles of spacecraft are all authentic. The game has full EAX support, and environmental sound affects are generally excellent. Full surround sound is certainly well executed, if not quite on par with some other recent releases. The full orchestral score is fantastic, and done in the true Star Wars spirit, with themes that represent moods, and light or dark side characters or events interspersed with excerpts of those familiar themes from the original films at significant moments. And of course, the full Star Wars theme remains present.
 

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