Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox, 2003)

That's pretty much what you'll be asking yourself throughout the game, because for some reason Bioware saw fit to reuse the same character models over and over again...everywhere. Normally this isn't the end of the world, but I noticed that paired with the cloned models, the majority of the dialogue(especially alien) was exactly the same and didn't fit with what was actually being said. You know something is wrong when your Wookie counterpart Zaalbar grunts and groans for for nearly a minute just to say three words. You'll find yourself constantly skipping through mountains of dialogue because you've heard it all a thousand times before, they really needed to individualize these characters some more. Don't believe me, talk to a few Twi'Lek's...you'll become a speed reader real fast.

Another thing which kinda chapped my ass was the swoop bike races. I found it more frustrating than fun seeing as how the developers left you with little margin for error (especially in the 2nd and 3rd tier/rounds). You also can't upgrade your swoop bike, even though that's what most of the other NPC do. But to be honest, even if you could upgrade your bike, the real question is: Would you even want to? I also found the Ebon Hawk gun turret mini-game equally boring and useless. There just wasn't any point to it other than to break things up between space travel, six fighters, awkward controls and nothing to it.

My last gripe and a rather minor one was the actual usage of your party members. Because lets face it, there were those in your party that were pretty much useless and only needed once to further the story (T3-M4 anyone?). I was disappointed at how your party members automatically leveled up even if you stopped using them altogether. But if you did manage to give one of your freeloadin Ebon Hawk stowaways another try to spice things up, fear not, they'll level up with everyone else regardless of how often you use them. I guess they didn't want any one character to get left behind if you really needed them to further the story later. Logical in theory, but it felt forced in the RPG scheme of things. Also, when you top off your characters light or dark side alignment, that's it, you can't be any more good or evil than you already are. So for example if your playing completely on the light side and peek that force meter all the way up, you don't get any incentives or rewards for doing more good, why bother. I found myself doing bad things from time-to-time just to have a change of pace, besides theres plenty of opportunities to do more good and make it up. And I was also a bit peeved making it thru the whole game only using light and universal powers, not knowing that you could use Dark powers without losing light points. Sure it costs more force points, but it would have been worth it.
The story was halfway decent. I liked all of the hidden character back stories and development. I actually felt compelled to talk to each and every member of my party just to get a little more insight to their troubled past (Although most Magazine reviewers put too much hype on HK-57, he wasn't that funny). The Gameplay was very solid, I appreciated the pause in time when ever you'd encounter an enemy so-as you can properly prepare for battle. I also liked the various weapons and upgrades you can aquire, although you'll find that you won't use half of them. The Graphics looked okay, but considering it was on the XBOX I expected more.