The sci-fi setting is put to terrific use in the game's consistently dazzling animations and spell effects. I think BioWare's bet was a sound one, and there will be plenty of folks more than happy to trade in their bows and arrows for blaster rifles.

I like the game's graphics style-very reminiscent of the Knights of the Old Republic series-though the light-hearted look won't be to everyone's tastes. The pool of playable species, however, is miniscule-you'll be disappointed if you were dead-set on playing a freaky-looking alien. A few class designs do break the mold a bit, such as ranged and stealth tanks, but most fall in line with traditional archetypes. Combat relies on the traditional trinity setup, so you can choose to focus on healing, tanking, or DPS as one of the eight advanced classes available to each faction.

TOR is a BioWare RPG through and through, so you'll be doing the standard BioWare RPG stuff: gathering a crew, meeting interesting people, making moral choices, killing stuff, and upgrading gear. It's an unexpected tool that BioWare uses to leverage player emotion and create some of the most engaging, moving story moments I've ever played in an RPG-moments that are light-years beyond what we've seen in MMOs so far. An abandoned friend suffers his ineluctable fate a rescued child remains grateful and secure. I immediately wanted to load a quicksave and reverse my decision, but I couldn't-unlike BioWare's library of other RPGs, The Old Republic is an MMO and everything you do here is permanent, with unavoidable consequences. After consulting five different people (including my wife over the phone), I reluctantly made my choice on the familiar BioWare dialog wheel and betrayed my always-faithful insectoid allies in order to defend the man who'd just slain his own wife to prove his loyalty. It was a simple question-did I intend to resist his claim to this land?-made complicated by the previous eight hours of politics, betrayal, espionage, and war. 30 minutes had passed since my insectoid ally had asked me.

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