http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/star-wars-the-old-republic/user-reviews
Being a huge fan of the KOTOR games, I was pretty excited when I heard that Bioware would be making another foray into the Star Wars Universe. I looked forward to the innovation that they could bring to the increasingly stale genre and hopefully renew my interest for MMORPGs. As the beta grew closer, I of course bought into all the hype, the promises and the CGI trailers that I desperately hoped were gameplay. Instead of getting a true successor to KOTOR 2 in MMO form, I got World of Warcraft : Star Wars Edition.
Needless to say, I was incredibly disappointed when I learned it was going to be standard fare in terms of MMO combat (hotkeys, stand there and watch your cooldown bar) but I had at least hoped that I was going to get some good quality controls. But when I got my early access build, I was incredibly disgusted to see that not only were the controls boring and uninspired, they were simply bad. Everything felt underwater and clunky and once I was in combat, it simply felt unresponsive. I had no real connection to the buttons I was pressing and the things my hero was doing on screen.
However, the real story here is well, the story. A story driven, fully voice acted MMO, the first of it's kind. Heck, it's Bioware even, people who brought us such excellent work's like Baldur's Gate and KOTOR, so the writing can't be bad, right? Right guys? Well, I was wrong. This writing was much more along the lines of the recent abomination Dragon Age 2. Every line with the opposite gender was dripping with flirtation, every line that was supposed to be delivered seriously had a comical air to it. Everytime they were close to bringing me into the universe, I was ripped right back out into ours as some horribly delivered cheesy line was spoken. Most of the time I ended up just skipping right through the dialogue as it wasn't nearly good enough to warrant my interest. Voice acting is all great, but really, it's just an expensive way to sugarcoat the fact that you want me to kill 10 enemies and collect 5 of their body parts just like I've been doing for years.
Visually speaking, this game is unimpressive for a game coming out in Q4 2011. From what we've seen with recent MMOs and ones yet to be released, this game is three to four years behind in graphical technology. I won't mention all the visual glitches that I was getting, because it's still a very early build, however, I will mention the overall very poor quality. The shadows looked something out of the Playstation 2 era and were so distracting, that I actually had to turn them off.
Texture wise, while they clearly payed attention to things such as characters, weapons and armor, they also clearly went right over most of the environment and let most of it be incredibly poorly done for such a high budget game. It terms of the art style, it actually reminds me of a game called Free Realms, a free MMO. This may sound like an insult, however, it is not. Free Realms has a wonderful, cartoon style that is both technologically undemanding, yet pleasant to look at.
Sadly, I have to say that SWTOR actually looks worse, whilst being in the same art style. The animations in various battle scenes had me in tears at points, mostly because of how pitifully bad they were. Now if you like Star Wars and/or Bioware, there is nothing I can say that will stop you from playing this game. You will probably enjoy it because of your brand loyalty and there is frankly nothing I can do about it. But please, if you are looking in on this game as an outsider, I highly recommend you do not play this game.
till 
