Nox

"A well-done job with few complaints"

Nox is a well-made RPG from Westwood, which you never expect to make games which are low quality. Nevertheless, Nox still has a few downpoints.

Storyline 7/10
The easily understood story makes the game nice to play, or thought about. Its about this guy who gets warped to some other world, and then his supposed to stop evil and return to Earth. Sound familiar? Maybe, the usual 'kill the baddie' plot. But then its interesting to keep you attached to the game for a while.

Controls & Interface 8/10
Easy to select items or whatever else, and also simple to navigate through the different menus. There's basically one and sort of a half of menu-levels, so don't worry about getting lost. One bad thing is that to get the lowdowns and stats on a certain item, you'll need to select the inspect tool, and click on the item. Sounds easy, but frustating as there's a few important stats that you might have to check on from time to time.
You can custommize your controls to suit your style, but most of the preset customizations are set for optimal play. Nothing complicated here, movement is unlike Diablo. Instead of point to where you wanna go and click, you move the arrow around your character, and sort of like a compass, the arrow points in different directions. Then you press another key (customized for 'move forward') to move. Because of this, this RPG is more like an action game.

Gameplay 6/10
You get three different character classes, each one unique with its own up and downs. Enough for most players. The bad part is, once you reach around Chapter 3 or 4, everything starts to get boring. Why? All classes will go to the same places, do tasks that are mostly identical. Mostly the different part is the difficulty, and some minor modifications. Monsters don't vary, you do get to meet all of them (and often, get whacked).

Sound 8/10
This is one of the best things about this game. Everything is clearly heard, very important if you don't wanna get ambushed by some ugly thing. During installation, you can opt to install the voice files, this won't do much, except give voices to NPCs. Makes adventuring pleasant, though it takes up considerably some hard disk space. The music is also nice, but repetitive. Usually the nice to hear pieces are in towns where no fighting happens. But once action starts, you won't really care about the music.

Graphics 8/10
Westwood decided that this game should work on about every graphic card, and indeed, you can set graphical options on or off, thereby possible to troubleshoot or increase performance. The textures are all well detailed, but repeats too much (you don't see much other than rock, plant walls or built walls). Characters are also detailed, you can somehow manage to see and differentiate between different equipped items. Other than that, its the great special effects present in magic usage whic all of us have grown to love.

Generally this game is great, well produced and planned. But if more time was utilised, it could have been better, especially the gameplay for each class. Replayability is so-so, but if you get the idea of the game, you might come back for more.

Overall Score: 7/10
Replayability: Medium

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/00, Updated 07/09/00