Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox
Genre: Action
Publisher: Aspyr Media
Developer: Aspyr Media
Release Date: June 8, 2022

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Switch Review - 'Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords'

by Chris "Atom" DeAngelus on June 9, 2022 @ 12:00 a.m. PDT

The Sith are on the verge of crushing the Old Republic. With the Jedi Order in ruin, the Republic’s only hope is a lone Jedi in exile struggling to reconnect with the Force.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is set a few years after the original game. Players control a lone Jedi in exile, a hero of the Mandalorian Wars who disobeyed the Jedi Council to fight and was punished for it by being exiled from both the Jedi and the galaxy at large. No sooner do they come back than they find themselves being hunted by menacing Sith Lords who believe them to be the last Jedi. With nothing to their name but a discarded title and a slowly returning connection to the Force, the exiled Jedi must find a way to unite a force before the Sith destroy the Jedi and the Republic once and for all.

To this day, what makes The Sith Lords stand out is how it approached the stereotypical Star Wars cast and concepts and took them in interesting directions. Rather than a ragtag band of heroes, you have a massively dysfunctional group who serve as strange mirrors of popular Star Wars movie and extended universe characters. For example, one character is a Wookie like Chewbacca who swore a life debt to someone who saved him. Unlike Chewbacca, this particular Wookie views the life debt as a maddening form of slavery and wants nothing more than to kill the person who he views himself as enslaved to.


That is the big part of what makes Sith Lords shine. It approaches concepts like the Force guiding actions, Droids being sentient tools, and the morality of going to war and makes them a central part of the story with interesting characters. Even in the wake of the modern Disney stories, it remains a distinct take on the franchise. It is also nicely subtle about certain plot beats, and you may miss huge chunks of interesting story or character if you don't talk to people.

Probably the standout is Kreia, the elderly Jedi who mentors your protagonist. She is neither Jedi nor Sith but a breed all her own. Her relationship with the Force is fraught and complex, and her goal is always to make you question your actions. She may criticize or judge, but she always asks you to consider why you made the choice. You can be kind and still win her favor or do exactly what she says and lose her respect because she is disappointed in your unwillingness to stand up for yourself. The entirety of The Sith Lords is Kreia's game, and to this day, she remains the single best example in the franchise of a "gray Jedi."

The game isn't flawless, though. It still suffers from a lot of the "saintly good or baby-kicking evil" morality that was in the first game, where many choices came across as needlessly cruel. There is an influence system that allows you to gain or lose points with a character. However, the binary morality of the early 2000s is still a poor fit, even if good and evil are not as easily defined in the universe.

The core gameplay in The Sith Lords is largely unchanged from the first game. It's still a D&D-like RPG in more visual wrapping where you build up characters and all combat takes place involving invisible dice rolls. The large change comes from a lot of small, under-the-hood changes that make the game friendly to unusual ideas or builds. It's far more reasonable to play the game without a lightsaber (or any weapon at all), and most party members can either be turned into a Jedi (or Sith) or be given substantial upgrades that let them keep up with Force-using party members.


The Sith Lords has aged about as well as the first game in the long run. It's still fun, but it's very easy to see how the mechanics lack polish. Some items and skills are worthless, and others are absurdly overpowered. When you unlock a Prestige class at level 15, it can be a downgrade in some cases because of how skills are laid out. At the same time, certain Force powers or feats effectively shatter the game, and it's way too easy to end up being good at everything. It's not the end of the world, but it means that beyond a certain point, fights end up feeling tedious.

There's still a lot to like. The Sith Lords has gone out of its way to give every skill in your potential skill tree some use outside of combat. Skills like Repair or Computer Use are useful for repairing broke machines, but they can also be used in conversation to potentially find new paths or easier solutions. Likewise, you can use your party members to fill any mechanic need you have that isn't direct conversation, so you can focus on what you want instead of having to do what the game needs. In terms of role-playing, it's a big step up from the first game.

Unfortunately, The Sith Lords is not a particularly great port. Part of this is that the original game was pretty darn buggy, and not a ton has been done to clean it up. I had a number of game-breaking glitches that caused me to lose hours of progress, including several hard crashes to the home screen when I was doing things like selecting party members. Small bugs were commonplace, which was true of the original game, but it might still throw off people. One bug I kept running into that I didn't encounter in the first game involved cut scenes being skipped or fast-forwarded through without rhyme or reason, forcing a restart so I could actually see the context. In several cases, if I hadn't known a cut scene was there, I might have missed it.


There's also the elephant in the room that is the Restored Content DLC. Knights of the Old Republic II was launched in an infamously rushed state, with the entire last chunk of the game being borderline incoherent. There were also several dropped plot lines that fans reconstructed because the content was on the Xbox disc in a mostly finished state. This content is coming to the Switch version as later DLC, so it's being tacked on later … again.

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is a fairly weak port of a flawed classic. The core characters and writing are still among the best in the entire franchise, but the gameplay is rapidly showing its age, and many of the flaws from the original release are still present. Fans of the franchise who may have skipped this particular entry should absolutely give it a shot, but for longtime fans, the Restored Content DLC is going to be the real game-changer.

Score: 7.0/10



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