Like with the first game, I didn’t grow up playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, or KOTOR 2 for short, but I did play some of it on a friend’s PlayStation 2 a while back. But how does the game fare on the Switch? Is this port worth getting? Well, let’s see.

After making your character, deciding the class, gender, starting attributes, skills, and feats, KOTOR 2 starts with an optional tutorial with you playing as T3-M4, or T4 for short, making repairs on a crashing Ebon Hawk. As you roll around, you see an unresponsive old lady, your avatar in bad shape on a medical bed, and you hear a banging sound from a room you can’t access. Afterward, you wake up in a chamber and find the old lady from before and a man named Atton in a force shield jail cage. From there, your story begins as an Exile Jedi. You try to stop the Sith while gaining influence over your companions, taking side quests, and basically doing the same stuff as the first game. 

Speaking of the first game, I definitely recommend you play KOTOR as there are recurring Star Wars characters and plot elements that continue from there. After playing the first one, you’ll find that most of the gameplay is the same. 

It has turn-based combat, and once you get within range of enemies, the game pauses for you to decide how you and your companions will attack. And then you can unpause to initiate those actions. If you want to change your attack, you can do so while battling, but if you change your target, it will pause again. You can use weapons (blasters or swords), grenades, force moves (dark or light), and land mines. One move I like to use is Force Speed, which you can use outside of battle to move around faster, making it incredibly useful when doing side quests. Another is Force Drain, a dark side move that works like Giga Drain in Pokemon, damaging the enemy while gaining health for you.

A ‘switch weapon’ button is pretty useful. You can assign a blaster in one slot and a sword weapon in the second one and easily switch between them, depending on the combat range you find yourself in. For example, certain companions can join your team depending on your alignment, gender, or supplies. So making more dark side or light side choices can affect who you get, making the game replayable to try to get different companions. Like in the first game, you can have two companions with you at a time. Overall, there are thirteen companions as opposed to the original’s nine.

I have to admit that there are bugs that, from what I looked into, weren’t in the original game or other ports. This port seems to have some issues. Like in the beginning tutorial, the graphics were sharp and great. But, the further I got into the story, they seemed fuzzy and muddled, like they were underwater or something. Still, I started it up again, and the graphics seemed back to sharp!? It’s very strange. I also got an error that closed my game before a cutscene loaded; thank goodness for autosave! The cinematic cutscenes have very poor audio quality; they are staticky and super loud compared to the rest of the game. I tried to fix it with the option settings, but it didn’t help.

Overall, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is not the best port on the Nintendo Switch. It’s priced at $15.00, and I can’t recommend it as much as its predecessor unless you want a portable copy of KOTOR 2. Of course, updates might be made to patch the various bugs, but if you want to try out this version, be aware of the glitches and frequently save so you don’t lose anything if it crashes!