Thread: Star Wars: The Old Republic Review

The Good

The Story. This game follows the premise of the KoTOR games. The story is gripping, everything you do ties together with everything else, and has a wonderful flow to it.

The Environments. As much variety as a box of chocolates. City scapes, frozen wastelands, forests, temples, ruins, and they are HUGE. Each world is large, and there are multiple words. Each World is a Leveling zone, which you will travel to while going through the story. Kind of WoWesque but still well done.

Instances/World Bosses. Giving good instances for all levels. Not to long, but a few good Raid like instances with good story behind them as well. Every Raid/instance gives you an actual good reason to do it. Also the return of the World Boss. Every world seems to have it's own special boss that you can take your buddies out to go take down.

Companions/Crew Skills. As you go along in the story you recruit some specialized companions to work alongside you. You can choose to bring them along to battle alongside of you, or best of all, they do all that hard work of gathering and creating for you. That's right, no more having to run around gathering raw materials (You still can, but for a small fee your companions can do it for you). So while you're out saving the universe, your companions can net you a nice profit over time if you put them to good use.

The Bad

WowEsque. Anybody that has played wow could immediately move over to ToR and get right into the groove. Binds are effectively the same, and I feel as if I'm playing WoW with a skin sometimes. But considering how much we love Star Wars, it's a fantastic skin.

Graphical Errors/Game Errors. Granted it is a newly launched game from a company with little to no MMO experience, but some of the graphical and game play glitches are annoying. Nothing like trying to find your way up to that Mining node because it's rare, and it hasn't despanwed/respawned so you can mine it. Instead it's just a part of the landscape now. Top that with extremely random light beams shooting across your screen once and a while, it detracts from the overall feel of the game.


The Ugly

Service Level - The game doesn't install into Origin, you have to find and download the client, and then activate everything through the Old Republic web page.

Overall, with the fact that it's a new launch, and a new gaming genre for EA, Bioware did a very good job making it feel like a continuation of the KOTOR series, while still making it a good MMO. Overall I give it a 8/10.

This game did look pretty fun, but monthly subs makes me sad