This sequel follows on from the events of the first game. The first game was set after a war against the Mandalorians where two Jedis; Malak and Revan help win the war, but at a cost of turning to the darkside. In the following battle, Revan was defeated and went missing, whereas Malak continued amassing a Sith uprising. The twist in the first game was that your character was actually Revan who was captured by the Jedi and was brainwashed (using some kind of Force amnesia) to join the Republic to help overthrow Malak.
This time, you play as a disgraced Jedi who also suffers with memory problems and their connection to the Force is weakened (but they start reconnecting with the Force soon after). So it sounds like a near identical set-up. In the prologue, your character is unconscious, so you play as a robot that needs to fix the ship in order to dock safely at the nearby mining colony.
At the mining colony, sinister events are unfolding as you wake up in a bacta tank, the only survivor of a poison attempt. You soon meet Kreia, a blind force user who you seem to have a Force connection to. You learn that the Sith are tracking you down because they believe you are the last Jedi.
The gameplay is an RPG which is very Dungeon and Dragon-inspired in its systems. You can pause the combat, dish out new instructions, then watch the outcome. Bioware used this template in their Dragon Age series.
There's not many instructions to dish out though, so it is often very boring. It’s more like “Basic attack”, “ability 1, “abilty 2”. It’s one of those systems where you have a high chance of missing which looks a bit silly when you struggle to hit a stationary turret, or an enemy that you have frozen in Stasis. Watching your soldier repeatedly fire lasers into the nearby wall is frustrating to watch and drags the battles on for longer than necessary.
There’s a decent choice of weapons. There’s ranged weapons of blaster pistol and blaster rifles, melée weapons like swords, lightsabers, or simply - fists. You can dual wield single-handed weapons, but will need the skill points to be able to take advantage of them.
Skills allow you to stealth, detect/disable mines, hack into computers, open locked doors and chests, repair broken droids to fight for you (a rare occurrence in this game), and persuade in conversation. There are several other characters which join your party over the course of the game, but you can only have 2 active at once. These characters have their own skills and it’s definitely beneficial to have someone who can unlock doors and hack into computers. I felt many of the characters didn’t have strong reasons for aiding you. Additionally, even though you can be really abusive towards them, they still stick around.
The controls are still very clunky; so you still encounter situations where your character will run up to the enemy, turn around and target a different enemy. Characters will get in your way, or you will get stuck on objects with larger hitboxes. Even if your characters have the awareness to detect mines, they will still run through them to attack an enemy.
There’s plenty of dialogue, and you can click on dialogue options to progress the conversations. Many options seem quite abrasive. It’s clear which are darkside/lightside choices by the tone. Your character understands loads of alien languages, although the audio is delivered in the alien language, so the game involves a lot of reading rather than listening.
It’s your choice to play good or evil. Since I played the previous game as a nice person, I decided to be evil, and generally give snarky or arrogant comments. I put loads of skill points in persuasion, and used Force powers for combat.
The areas can be large, but some areas are fairly linear. So even though you get quests and wonder where they are talking about, you should be able to find the area just by following the paths. Across the game, you will visit Telos, Dantooine, Nar Shaddaa, Dxun, and Korriban (two places are slightly modified locales of the previous game).
Medpacs don’t heal much, even when your characters have skills in Treat Injury. Later on in the game, you do gain access to much better medpacs but these should have been available much earlier. When you level up, this also restores your health which is a system I took advantage of.
Some characters will challenge you to a blackjack-like card game called Pazaak that is often a good opportunity to win some credits.
I was really surprised at how well the graphics have held up. The difficulty is quite erratic. It felt easy for the most part, but can have severe spikes in certain battles. There’s a few battles where you have to fight 1 on 1, some of these aren’t with your main character. I felt I had to essentially cheat to get past them.
Obsidian apparently churned this game out quickly which was helped by reusing assets and some locations from the first game. It also shipped with loads of bugs and cut content which can be resolved by downloading a mod.
I think it is debatable if this game is better than the first one. It is still pretty bland and janky in terms of gameplay. Like the first game, it is a good representation of the Star Wars universe. I’m aware that people regard this series as among the best Star Wars games, but there’s not much to the gameplay, and when it lasts around 30 hours; it’s a bit of a slog.