Neverwinter Nights

"Just below mediocre."

Neverwinter nights, basically is highly overrated. Sure it gets multiplayer right, but in the end, the OC inspires about as much awe as a block of cement, and quite frankly looks a lot less natural. The characters, the elements that really make or break a DnD game, broke it in much the same way that greasy guy on the bus breaks wind. The graphics, were great if you liked shadows, but apart from that? Blocky, and lacking in variety where it counted most.

This game succeeds in one area, and fails in a lot of others. Sure the Toolset is nice to have, but this is a review for the game, not the toolset.

Now onto the different parts where is fails:

Graphics: 5/10.

Why five when they had all of those lovely shadows? Because, that's all there is folks, a bunch of lovely shadows. Morrowind, had moving lips, water that looks like water, and a whole lot more mobility, and it takes up less of my system resources then this game uses to give the player those lovely shadows. Moreover, Neverwinter looks a startling lot like Luskan, complete with plague victims.

Gnomes look like apes, and dwarves lack beards. I had to download the CEP to get a dwarf with a satisfactory beard, and that should be considered blasphemy. The Half-elves look exactly the same as humans, which is just lazy.

In short, while there are things that look good, they do not look good enough to be a saving grace.

Story: 1/10

I was bored in the first chapter. You know what a publisher does if they are bored in the first chapter of a book? They send it back with a little note telling the author he should look into accounting. The first betrayal, is so obvious a three year old could spot it, and thus fails to win any emotion.

The first series of main quests are dull, dull, dull. It's go fetch the bits of monster, while fighting through hordes of uninteresting monsters. Take the jailbreak, the first quest that more or less comes to your attention. There was plenty of room for this to be an interesting and indeed funny part of the game, but no, it's as gray and lacking in character as the rest of Neverwinter.

Gameplay: 3/10

Character creation is fun, but that is hardly a credit to the programmers as they got that from PnP Dungeons and Dragons. You don't get a party to play with, and the henchman AI is about as bright as the average rock, which is balanced by the sheer stupidity of your enemies I suppose.

The game plays much like Diablo II, if your character had to be in constant combat or lose their armor value. Yep, flat footed works that way here, where you don't have to be surprised, you just have to stop fighting to do something else like drink a potion.

Play as a rogue, and you will soon find the one thing you have over the other classes is disarming floor traps, which itself is equally well done by a mage with the pixie familiar. Stealth is quite frankly topped by invisibility.

Sound: 4/10

The music was unnoticeable and forgettable, and the voice acting for the main characters ranged from mediocre to poor. There is only a certain amount you can say about combat noises, and quite frankly, generic covers it. The voice sets, on the other hand, ranged from poor to downright offensive, particularly the female voice sets.

The fanboys will point to Aribeth, but quite frankly the lines were delivered as overdramatic monologues that in a game where they hired the voice actors from the local math's teachers convention would have been called “Mediocre at best”.

Multiplayer: 10/10

Now here is where the fanboys will say the effort went into. This would have excused, say, a short campaign in my opinion, it does not excuse a bad one, and the OC is bad. That said, due to the modding community, there is a strong library of good games, and a few worlds worth exploring. The CEP improves the game nicely, and generally it is fun to play with your friends. Lots of games do it, but Neverwinter does that well at least.

Tilt: 4/10

Lets put it comparatively, because I would dearly have loved to have enjoyed this game, the way I enjoyed Baldur's Gate II, Diablo II, Icewind Dale I&II, Arcanum, Morrowind and the Final Fantasy series, but it lacked complexity of Baldur's Gate II, the fun of Diablo II and the Icewind Dale series, the unique world of Arcanum, the awe inspiring graphics of Morrowind, and the story of any of the Final Fantasies. It just wasn't going to happen.

It is time we, as gamers, stopped excusing poor games, and poor storylines. Sure they supplied a good toolset, but that does not excuse the game's failings in other areas, and that they, as professionals, did not produce the best campaign out there for the game, should just be considered embarrassing.

Overall: 4/10.

Buy/Rent/Avoid? Depends. If you want to play a multiplayer game, buy the platinum version, otherwise avoid.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/18/05