Neverwinter Nights 2

"Unimaginative, unoptimized, and boring!"

Let's start with one of the more lackluster areas, story

"After an attack on their hometown. A resident of an out of the way farming village ventures out in order to learn about the shiny fragment of metal he has found" is an entirely accurate description and is indeed as much a storm of cliche as it seems (just how many items on the The Grand List Of Console RPG Cliches are in that tiny introduction alone?). Unlike most stories that set up such a plot, everything is as clear and simple as it seems. If your vocabulary alone is up to date (note that the game calls it a shard) , you will realize that the shard is one of sevreal that you must track down (I think that is another).The storyline like to dictate every detail of your characters history, leaving little up to you. Some games have done well by presetting your character, but those games worked because the story they told was about The Nameless One, The Avatar, Geralt ect. and how you shaped it. Neverwinter Nights 2 however is not a story about the players character, and indeed the player has no real choice in the plot. The player is given no choice but to fetch the shard. The player is given no choice but to be shoved into being the messenger boy to find it's origin. These things would be ok if existed exclusively in the prologue, but it doesn't. The player is given no choice but to do every little thing the plot demands, makeing a completely linear experience.

Dialog is something I could pretty much rip from my Knights of the Old Republic review if I wanted. Dialog is the same tired, unbelievable, and above all, stupid, Bioware Dialogue (in a game that wasn't made by Bioware!) with some Lawful Stupid/Chaotic Stupid choices. "Keep your reward" and "Thanks for the money, now I'll kill you" were not interesting the first time, and they are not interesting now!

The companions that join the players party all feel poorly designed. Every non-human character that joins your party is the straightest you can play the stereotypical portrayal of the race they belong to, in the first chapter alone "gives" you a ale loving dwarf that likes to fight, a thieving lieing Tiefling (A human with a demon or devil in their ancestry), and a nature freak elf. I would like to say the quality of NPCs get better, but I can't, only the humans that join your party get any characterization beyond such stereotypes, and they are still stock characters! What is worse is that the game forces each of these memebers into your party, and at times into your active party.

The game is nearly universally poor with system usage. The load times are long enough that jokes that were formerly hyperbole like "make a sandwich in the time it take to load" while you wait seem less like a joke every time you hit one. Slowdown is present on a PC with recommended specs and most graphical effects set to low (with medium being recommended) on even small areas, thanks to the overly flashy effects for combat, even without combat, the game tends to slow down in bigger areas.

The combat like every other game with this RTWP system, is uninvolveing and a chore at the same time, while the player has little proper interaction with the combat (simply selecting a new target each time the old one dies) he is a babysitter to the AI, as the AI still attempts to abandon every fight and all orders the player gives them to chase some far off enemy (This enemy most likely hasn't even joined the battle yet!) and takes your squishy wizards, and run them straight at the enemy to attack them in melee, predictably, they quickly die and hurt your standing in the fight, as they have attracted large numbers of enemy and you no longer have this party members support . Although mods exist to fix the AI issues, I am reviewing Obsidian's work, not the mod community's.

The encounter design is also a pain, the game throws countless low level low risk foes at you, these only wind up annoying as your characters chop down these legions with minimal use of resources. Another issue that is apparent is that half the monsters in the campaign after the first act are undead. Undead monsters are immune to the class features of sevreal classes. The Rogue's primary class feature, sneak attack, is useless, as undead are immune to it. Undead are also immune to mind effecting abilities, relegating bards to uselessness. No information is given about this until you acctualy clear the first chapter, and at this point it is far too late to start over, so woe to the player who has a character that is now useless.

Actions regularly fail to be recognized by the game, requiring the player to enter them sevreal times (even that doesn't work all the time...). The UI is littered with issues that hinder the player, some are as minor as items sometimes not automatically stacking (requiring the player to manually drag them over eachother) and the various (6 types with 3 grades) crafting items all look almost exactly the same, requiring a mouse over to tell what one is which, or the minimal number of items per page, to things as big as all of those issues happening at one time (this common one is much greater then the sum of it's parts), or the camera that, due to the ease of combat (barring the AI baby sitting), is the hardest enemy in the game.

The game is full of other minor issues that really bug you as you play. The player is slaped with countless titles (such as Harborman, Knight Captain and any number of generic sounding titles) throughout the game so the game can address the player in voice acting. This winds up being significantly more awkward then if the game had just stuck to "you" and other pronouns.


Buy/avoid
If your are considering the base game only, avoid at all costs. However, the gold edition, containing the first expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer, is worth a buy, as it is somehow an excellent product in spite of the quality of the original game.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/09, Updated 04/08/09

Game Release: Neverwinter Nights 2 (US, 10/31/06)