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Fool Me Twice

Remember a game, way back when, called Outpost? Probably not. But I remember it. Hyped to death by the gaming press (then much smaller and generally more honest), it was a flaming car wreck. I mean, not just a bad game, basically almost no game, and certainly nothing like the glowingly complimentary picture painted by gaming journalists.

The price of that game from my perspective was that it was a very long time before I bought a Sierra game again. This time it's going to be a very long time before I buy anything from LucasArts.

Let's be clear here. KOTOR 2 is a role-playing game. It's not a first-person shooter. The combat is fun, but it's ultimately secondary to character development and storyline. So I can tolerate combat imbalance, though it's remarkably unbalanced at times in this game. What I can't tolerate is a poor execution of a story. And as every other reviewer has noted, the story is a disaster. It would be one thing if it was overly short but coherent, but instead, it's simply missing gaping chunks as you approach the last third of the game.

Your character is someone who is supposedly regaining memory as time goes on, rather like in the first KOTOR, but in this game, as your character regains memory, you start to lose it. You ask yourself, "Hey, what happened to that character?" or "Wasn't that droid destroyed?" or "What the hell is all that stuff about Mandalore in the conclusion? I never heard ANY of that before."

Etcetera.

This really breaks faith with the gamer. There has got to a price paid for it. In my case, it's this: no more Lucas Arts. Period. Not until I see them seriously apologize for this failure and seriously set out to make it right--not just this game, but reorganization so that it doesn't happen again.