It’s a damn good thing that this game provided such an increasingly immersive and entertaining experience the more I played it, because I was all set to write it off as a buggy, incomplete release that could have been easy contender for best RPG of 2005 (on the PC, anyways), but was marred due to numerous technical bugs that really are unacceptable on any level. However, once I finally found a few ways to work around these problems (the 4.2 Catalyst drivers and an INI file tweak I discovered – “Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1” under the “Graphical Options” part of swkotor2.ini, for the curious), I was finally able to begin enjoying the game’s true beauty and suddenly changed my opinion. KOTOR2’s storyline is just as good and epic as that of the first game’s, and this alone makes it well worth experiencing for any RPG fan, but add in the still-solid (if a little unbalanced) combat system and lots of fun little mini-games and side-quests, as well as a huge exploration factor and lots of dialogue choices, and it’s easy to see why Knights of the Old Republic 2 is a “must-have” title. I genuinely wish however that the game had been polished up into a more stable state before being released, because I know the plethora of bugs are going to drive away a lot of people (and almost did the same to me), which is a fate this game definitely does not deserve. Despite my fond words, I strongly recommend waiting word of a patch before picking the game up, or risk being alienated from the game before it has a chance to truly suck you in. I don’t know what happened to force this game into the market when it clearly needed at least another couple of weeks of fix-up time, but now that it’s here, all I can state is that KOTOR2 is a really good RPG, but only if you’re part of the lucky minority that can run the game with none of the huge technical problems everyone else is suffering from.