Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark

"They ended on a bang, well almost"

What do you get when you blend Planescape Torment with Neverwinter Nights (NWN)? You get Hordes of the Underdark (HotU); that is what you get. You will have to wait until you have played the game for 20 hours or so, but you will see what I mean. In HotU, difficulty is cranked up from the start, and it was a nice twist being able avoid fighting the final boss. I respect developers when they give you the option to complete a game without having to fight the final boss. Final boss battles can be really frustrating and leave you with a bad taste in your mouth if the game does not finish quickly. All in all, a job well done.

Introduction - More Prestige classes (first introduced in Shadows of Undrentide - SoU), some difficult puzzles to solve and more and tougher baddies to fight; that is what you get here. Add to this a sudden profusion of in-engine cut scenes as the game finishes and you have it all summed up. This is all we expect from a well made expansion and in that sense, HotU satisfies. A nice touch appears at the end of the game as decisions made as the game ends are incorporated into the ending. This method appeared first (for me) in the Fallout games and give the ending more of a personal touch; nice.

Gameplay - 6 out of 10. Pretty much untouched from vanilla NWN. As already mentioned, there are more and tougher baddies to fight but this is what we expect in an expansion. The gameplay is spoiled to a certain degree if you rely heavily on henchmen. Deekin was fine from beginning to end but Nathyrra hardly ever contributed in major battles. It might have been me but, whatever tactics I tried, I was unable to get her to fight in the major battles. The problem of henchman AI existed all along with the NWN games but got worse in SoU and did not improve in HotU. Given that the NWN games can be completed solo, the problem with henchmen AI is simply that, a problem and not a deal breaker. A passing comment here is directed towards those, like me, who are not good with puzzle solving. Make sure you have a good FAQ to hand as the puzzles found in HotU will stump you. You have been warned!

Story - 8 out of 10. The story on display here is something of melding of stories from the earlier NWN games and a story produced just for HotU. It works well enough but stories in games is a huge subject and our expectation with regard to stories in games is modest anyway. Bioware produce RPG's that you can get yourself lost in and the story can get lost in games like that. Thankfully the largely linear nature of HotU prevents that from happening but the story here won't be remembered past your next sleep!

Graphics/Sound - 6 out of 10. As with the previous games, the sound was great throughout. Great, well actually I mean fantastic! Previous tunes were recycled and just a few new ones added for effect. With the graphics it is a different story. The graphics are basically unimproved from vanilla NWN. Vanilla NWN was released in 2002 and the graphics were a little crude even then. HotU was released 2 years later and problems that have plagued the game since 2002 still exist. These are (1) clipping problems when passing rigid objects and walls, (2) henchmen "warping" to new locations to catch up and (3) pathfinding for your main character. None of these problems are deal breakers but it is frustrating to see faults not fixed in a second expansion.

Play Time/Replayability - 7 out of 10. Enough and for some people, more than enough for others. As the game ended., I got the feeling the developers were just trying to stop me finishing the game early but otherwise the play time was spot on. I wouldn't want to play it again, but who would after playing the main game and 1 expansion already!

Final Recommendation - 7 out 10. All in all, I am glad to have have played the Neverwinter Nights trilogy and I give gredit to Bioware and Floodgate for their great work. The games are not classics but worth a place near to the best in the D-n-D RPG genre. The NWN games represented a huge gamble for Bioware. They moved from the great 2D on display in the Baldurs Gate (BG) games to 3D and tried a new, essentially solo (Diablo meets D-n-D) style of gameplay. The 3D was good, although flawed and the solo gameplay was strange to party players from the early BG games. If Bioware had resolved the problem with the henchman AI and improved the core graphics to eliminate the issues described above then I would have given HotU 8 or even 9 out of 10. HotU deserves 7 out of 10 and the series as a whole is probably worth 7.5 or 8 out of 10. Nuff said.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/13/08

Game Release: Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark (EU, 12/05/03)