XCOM: Enemy Unknown Third play through and probably the last, as it feels too familiar now and I blasted through the campaign in about 8 hours instead of the 18 or so for the first play. Time to move onto XCOM 2 I suppose.

Knights of the Old Republic (GOG)

Was one of two Bioware games that I haven't played yet, only Andromeda to go now. I enjoyed most of this one. It really gets the Star Wars feel right and it looks pretty good even today. I didn't mod it so I was only able to choose 1600x1200 max resolution, but it was sharp and had surprisingly good lighting. I didn't bother trying to mod it for widescreen since I was unhappy with the available methods. I had one graphical issue...areas with grass made the characters have no legs and smaller creatures were entirely invisible! The solution was to turn the grass off and I preferred the cleaner look anyway. I think the issue is caused by newer AMD drivers having some legacy features removed- same problems with Neverwinter Nights and ATI/AMD cards. Other than that, everything ran fine. I do wish that the game had UI scaling for the higher resolutions though.

It plays kinda like Star Wars NWN. For 99% of the game the combat was really easy. Some of those Jedi powers are so overpowered, like Droid Kill and Stasis Field. In a way though, that's true to the subject isn't it? Jedi and their Sith opposites ARE the most deadly combatants in the movies, so it wouldn't make any sense to make them weaklings that get rolled by a couple of Sandpeople.
Most of the companions were okay, especially HK-47. But I couldn't tolerate Jolee, exactly the type of boring old fart I can't stand- I hated the two parts where the game forced me to have him in the party.

So it was all okay up until the very final segment when the game totally changed. Waves of infinitely spawning enemies leading to a pair of my most hated type of boss fights. The type where you approach the most dangerous person in the galaxy and you stop and have a chat, then fight and bring him/her to 5% health and stop for a chat again. After which the boss regains full health. So you beat them down to 5% again and stop for another chat. Rinse, repeat. That final boss guy especially...damn. I think he replenished full health like 10 times whilst I just spammed those 300 health packs I'd collected because the rest of the game was so easy. Terrible end game sequence, one of the worst I can remember.

I did enjoy it overall, but the last hour did sour the feeling for me a bit in the end. Oh yeah, I played the light side...sort of. Mostly. There were times though when the light side dialog options were so repulsive to me that I couldn't bring myself to chose them. I really should have played Dark Side all the way as that is what suits my beliefs (survival of the fittest) closest anyway. Besides, anyone that makes friends of something as annoying as Gungans and Ewoks cannot be on the correct side as far as I'm concerned. I've learned my lesson and I'll be playing KOTOR 2 Dark Side for sure.