During the war against the Mandalorians, two Jedis; Malak and Revan help win the war, but at a cost of turning to the darkside. In the following battle, Revan is defeated, and Malak begins amassing a Sith uprising.
You assume the role of an amnesiac Republic soldier who wakes up on the cruiser, Endar Spire as it is under attack by Sith forces. The intro is very immersion breaking. You ask the other character how to equip items and he starts talking about menus. It takes a while to really get going.
The gameplay is an RPG which is very Dungeon and Dragon-inspired in its systems. It even has the “You must gather your party before venturing forth” (from Baldur’s Gate) when you try to leave an area without your party members beside you. 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. 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, and persuade in conversation. There are 9 other characters which join your party over the course of the game. 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.
The AI can be very clunky. Once there was an enemy next to me, and 3 enemies further away. I instruct my character to attack the nearest enemy; then she runs up to the 3 enemies, turns around and targets the enemy I actually clicked on.
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.
The areas can be large, but the main areas seem pretty 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 path. Across the game, you will visit Taris, Dantooine, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, and Korriban.
Medpacs don’t heal much, even when your characters have skills in Treat Injury. As long as you aren’t in a main mission area, you can teleport back to base which heals you, and are allowed to teleport back to the previous location. So you can just abuse that system instead of wasting medpacs. Later on in the game, you do gain access to much better medpacs but these should have been available much earlier.
Some characters will challenge you to a poker-like card game called Pazaak that is often a good opportunity to win some credits.
The collision box on your characters seems a bit too large, which means you often are prevented from moving because your party member is standing next to you. When this happens, you can just switch characters and move them out of the way.
There was a weird bug where you cannot move after combat, so you have to save and reload. This seemed to resolve itself if you enable V-sync.
I was really surprised at how well the graphics have held up.
After several hours of playing, I did find I enjoyed the game a little more, but it is still pretty bland and janky in terms of gameplay. Luckily, Bioware have done well representing the Star Wars universe. I’m aware that people regard this as one of 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.