Maybe he doesn't have a lot of faith in his aiming ability maybe he was one of those kids who played Duck Hunt with the light gun pressed right up against the TV. This is a guy armed with a gun, I'll remind you. making it more convenient for them to slice him into deli meat. You might think that this arsenal would give me a fairly bloated advantage when fighting melee-only enemies, but to balance that out the game gave me a standard BioWare NPC support companion whose job seemed to be harpooning enemies from a distance and pulling them really close. Most of my other special skills involved preventing enemies from getting close enough to attack, such as concession grenades, leg shots, and crafty knees to the bollocks (which for some reason still works on robots - perhaps they're all wearing Tanooki suits). This, it turned out, is a primarily long-range class, whose job is to hide behind things going pew-pew-pew with a blaster and, in curious defiance to how blasters usually behave in Star Wars, not missing ninety percent of the time. 3rd bloke from the left? I opted for smuggler, it brings back pleasant memories of an airplane ride I once took with three condoms fulls of pre-cut Acapulco gold. The class you inevitably pick will reflect your favorite Star Wars character, and, by extension, perhaps your personality: Are you a Jedi like Luke Skywalker, a noble, disciplined peacekeeper with a collective penis extension issue a smuggler like Han Solo, a free-spirited chancer with a heart of gold and his eyes on the prize or a trooper like.
Spaceships fly around, glowy sword fights sound like you're being whacked over the head with a florescent lighting rig, the good guys are clean-living humanoids with American accents, and the bad guys all draw squiggles on their faces with permanent marker. Apparently it's set centuries before Star Wars the movies, not that it seems to matter, because every period in the Star Wars canon seems pretty interchangeable. Have you guessed already that I'm talking about The Old Republic, BioWare's big, fancy, Star Wars-branded hat it's throwing into the MMORPG ring to get mauled by World of Warcraft like they always are? It could be considered a follow up to BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic single-player RPGs (they had to shorten the title so as not to alienate all the people role-playing lollipop ladies and dentists and whatever).Īfter a couple of cinematics depicting dull, ridiculously over-choreographed lightsaber fighting (since Star Wars is still forced to carry the attitude of the prequel movies around with it like a child dragging his stillborn Siamese twin), we find ourselves in the world of the Old Republic. You'd almost think a game that operates on a subscription service is deliberately trying to drag its runtime out, like Dennis Hopper set it to explode if it ever drops below slow walking pace. I'd love to discuss how the Republic trooper campaign and combat mechanics compare to the Sith babysitter campaign and combat mechanics, but it took me most of the time I had available just to get through one character's fucking prologue section. So yes, once again this review of an MMO will be more of a "first impressions" video. Especially when I only have a week! It's like having to write the Lonely Planet guide to Belgium when all you did was eat a waffle and fall asleep in a gutter in Bruges. Christing McBollockwaffles, do I hate reviewing MMORPGs.