Last week, as probably everyone knows by now, Lordhammer and I had the opportunity to fly down to Austin, TX, and visit the BioWare studios. After several long painful hours of unending hallways, signing NDA's, conversing with our fellow fan sites, and having David Bass tease us, we finally were able to sit down and play the game.

Lordhammer and I decided before we ever arrived who would be playing what.

Lordhammer would be playing the Bounty Hunter, as he did not want to ruin the Imperial Agent Story. So I ended up playing the Agent, which was fine, I had no real desire to play the agent when the game went live anyway... Well... I can say that the Agent has moved up on my list from dead last, to somewhere in the middle.

This post "should" follow a rough format of

• Story

• Gameplay

• Overall

"Story"

While I won't go into any great detail on the actual story (I really don't want to ruin it for anyone) I will say that the story was very compelling right out of the gate.

I was playing a Chiss, and within minutes of starting the game, you're introduced to several major players on the world of Hutta, now, this is probably expected, but what I didn't expect was just how quickly you were given the chance to dive right into the story and not look back.

I avoided the side quests until I absolutely had to do them, and I got to the point where (little did I know) I was only one mission away from the end of the starter planet. However, I could not complete that mission, it was just too hard. I received my companion, Kaliyo at level 4, which was quicker than most, as I only did the story missions, and I found that when you do start working with your companion, you really do start to make some bad choices... or at least I did, as far as taking additional risk, etc.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, the companion could handle her own pretty well, and in fact, really saved my butt a few times. On the other side of the note though, I did run into a few amusing bugs, like when the companion would rubberband into a group of mobs and then dissapear, aggro'ing them onto me. This was actually amusing though, since I had literally just finished a conversation where I really pissed her off... so I suppose it was karma.

ANYWAY. I found myself having to do a few side quests in order to level a bit to get to the point where I could complete the final mission to get to the Black Talon flashpoint. This wasn't really an issue, since I was waiting for Lordhammer anyway, so we actually ended up helping each other out on a few missions.

"Gameplay"

The Imperial Agent Gameplay (Combat, Cover, etc.) was a lot more interesting than I expected. I found myself actually enjoying the cover system, which still has some issues, but overall it works very well. At level 8 you get your portable cover, which makes it a bit easier since you don't have to "find" somewhere to take cover. (On a side note, Gumby IS still in the game, he's just gotten a graphics upgrade from the earlier versions we saw, and he's only green when you've "selected" a position to roll into, the rest of the time he is currently white.)

Combat was fun, engaging and not overly difficult while in cover, outside of cover however, it was tough... As an Agent, you're not wearing heavy armor, in fact, you're only wearing medium armor, so you really want to get into cover when you can, especially when soloing.

While in cover, your bar automatically switches to a secondary bar, there is also a toggle to switch to that bar, but you cannot use some of the skills unless you are in cover. Your companion will help out quite a bit by taking some of the fire, however, please not that they are not a full fledged player, the AI is amazing, but still be more careful than I was.

"Overall"

Overall, my impressions of the Imperial Agent are very favorable. I had no intention of ever really playing one, but I was very pleasantly surprised. With a compelling story, fun and very unique game mechanics, the class should be one that anyone will consider.