TECH2

You can play (or re-play) one of the greatest RPGs off all time, BioWare's epic Knights of the Old Republic right now, on your phone or tablet.

$10 is quite a deal, especially compared to the price when the game was new.

But is it any fun? Good question.

If you never played it, Knights of the Old Republic was (and is) one of the best Star Wars games ever. It’s a role playing action game with a 3rd-person perspective and real-time, but pauseable, combat. It features BioWare's excellent writing and voice acting, and a compelling story.

Like any good RPG, you can customize and advance your character, choosing everything from fighting style to how charming they are with other characters. You can draw a direct line from KotOR to BioWare’s current MMORPG The Old Republic which is entertaining for a bit, but is no pre-NGE Galaxies.

Knights of the Old Republic for iOS and Android is a pretty solid port, the touchscreen acting as an effective, if not overly fluid, control device.

The graphics are basically the same, which says a lot in how fast computing power has come in 12 years. I doubt my PC from 2003 could have played this game at 1,920 by 1,080, yet now my phone can. Crazy.

The Result

To be honest, something is lost playing on my HTC One. Part of it, I think, is the interaction is just that little bit more cumbersome than mouse/keyboard. I found playing… not quite a “chore” but certainly more tedious than playing on a real computer.

The other is the screen. Despite being a good size for a phone… it's still phone-sized. If I hold it close enough to my face to fill my field of view like my screen at home, I can’t interact with it.

So maybe playing on a tablet would be better (though more annoying to interact with?), but I’m still not convinced about being immersed in a game on a mobile device. That’s not to say it can’t happen, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that really catches my interest.

Still, it was fun to replay it for a bit, to remember why the game was so good.

If you have a long commute, or generally spend a lot of time sitting in one place playing games on your phone, I hope you’ve already gone and downloaded KotOR. For me, it’s not that I disliked it, it’s just I never had much drive to play it. But I won’t uninstall it either. So that’s something too, I guess.

The sequel is available too.