Neverwinter Nights

"Huge Dissapointment"

If you are a fan of DnD you will most likely be dissappointed.

Single Player Module is aweful. Hack and Slash all the way through. One or two good quests out of the 50 or so in the game. Tons of bugs that prevent you from moving on to next chapters. Henchman are buggy. Story is predictable and not engrossing at all, nothing like Biowares previous work.

Multiplayer is almost just as bad. It goes through Gamespy, which says enough right there. The netcode for the game is so bad that even with low pings and cable/dsl/T1 your character lags out and skips around the screen.

DM client is just broken. When you possess a monster to attack the adventure group the other monsters turn around and attack you! Also, when you possess a monster and players put the cursor on you, you don't register as hostile, you register as a PC. It gives the dialogue options instead of attack options. DM functionality is severly limited as to what you can do ingame also.

Toolset is the only reason I rated it as high as I did. It's semi-hard to script, you should have some C++ training to do that. The toolset is limited also in monsters and tilesets. It does allow you to make a decent hack n slash module if you'd like though.

Graphics. This game was 5 years in development and you can tell, graphics look dated, and animations are slow. Not too many clipping issues but it's also not true 3D. You can't fly, swim, climb, ride animals, etc. The camera angles are pretty bad and take a lot of getting used to.

Sound. The sound is pretty good. Jeremy Soul did the music, and while not as good as his previous work, it's still nice. No complaints for me here.

Replayability. The single player campaign that came with the game is forgettable. The user modules on the other hand, while not too great right now, have potential.

Fun. The most important part of any game. It doesn't matter how good a game can do <insert function> if it isn't fun. This game loses it's shine hours into it. I found myself playing for 30 mins to an hour at a time and turning it off. It didn't suck me into the game at all compared to Bioware's previous efforts, very dissappointing.

Overall, I'd skip this game. Majorly overhyped, it came out about 2 years too late. Released with some serious bugs, and tech support isn't too hot. It had huge potential but fell short in several areas.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/02, Updated 07/25/02