Overdue Reviews is an occasional series in which I pretend to be a videogame journalist. This week: Jade Empire on PC.
Knights of the Old Republic was an engrossing, intricately interwoven story driven RPG that I found fascinating from start to finish. So when I found out that developer Bioware had later made a similar style game based on Chinese mythology, I was keen to play it.
It was, however, deeply disappointing.
I'm not quite sure why it was so bad. As far as the mechanics of the game went it was basically KOTOR in a different setting, swapping lightsabers for martial arts and spaceships for, well, walking I suppose. It should have been great.
Instead, I found myself wandering through a world I didn't find interesting, meeting characters I didn't care about and getting involved in repetitive, dull combat. Most of the character customisation of KOTOR seemed to have been stripped out, and the big plot twist (when it eventually arrived) wasn't much to speak of. Also I have a dim memory of spending far too much time being distracted by finding pathetically small rewards in clay jars scattered across the landscape.
I tried to like Jade Empire. I really did. I played it all the way through, and even started a second game afterwards with a different character, just in case I'd missed something. It didn't help. It was still dull. I don't know what went wrong. I don't know why everyone else seemed to think it was good. Am I the crazy one? To this day, I still don't know.
If you get a chance to play Jade Empire, let me know how you get on. You can have my copy, if you like.