An excellent RPG. The system requirements are massive, but it's worth it. I haven't played around with the toolset yet..
Gameplay Positives: Everything you've come to expect from a Bioware/Obsidian RPG.
1) The character creation is good. They've done away with the portrait system and have gone with a more MMO-style method of character creation, which includes some really excellent choices for race, hair colour, skin colour, various heads and hairstyles.
2) Stat management (including skills and feats) is all straight from the Pen & Paper game, and therefore quite good.
3) Combat is fast-paced and the NPC AI is solid.
4) In this sequel, they've improved the use henchmen from the 1st game. Instead of the entire game basically being you and a negligible henchman, now you can have up to 3 other members of your party, each with way more influence and style than the henchmen of the first game.
5) Despite not having a top-line system, I haven't experienced any crashes out to my desktop. Those were wicked annoying in the first game.
Gameplay Negatives:
1) Frequent load-screens get to be extremely annoying.
2) There will be times when you find yourself wishing that you could micro-manage your party members' activities during a fight to a higher degree than what is currently programmed.
3) There are some clipping bugs still in the game that cause characters to get stuck and require loading a saved game to "fix".
4) The plot is severely more linear than the 1st game. This is one thing I like way less about this sequel. In the first game, you could pick and choose which quest you wanted to perform in which order, 90% of the time. In NWN2, you pretty much have to perform one quest after another with little to no choice.
5) Unless you have a monster system, the game is going to seriously chug along and chew up massive system resources (way more than the first game did).
Graphics Positives: This is a gorgeous game. The buildings and general geography is stunning. Bloom and particle effects are fantastic, and the level of control you get in the graphics options is customizable enough so that you can tone it down in a number of different ways if your system isn't top-line.
Graphics Negatives: The character models are good, and are actually the weakest point of the graphics. Some heads don't fit on the bodies they've been given, some hair looks like a helmet that doesn't fit well, etc. As I've said, unless you have a monster system with on of the latest graphics cards, your system is going to bog down considerably. At one point, before I reduced some of the graphics options and killed every process I had running on my machine in the background (antivirus, etc.) the graphics and camera speed were so bad that when I tried to rotate my camera view, it ticked along like the hands of a clock, and I'm running a GeForce 6600. The camera controls are also rather limiting. You will often find that, unless you're looking directly top-down at your characters, walls and trees and everything else will obstruct your line of sight.
Sound Positives: Excellent voice acting and environmental sound effects. The music is also good.
Sound Negatives: In many cases, they've just rehashed music from the first game instead of actually coming up with new music.
Reviewer's Tilt: An excellent RPG if you can get past the handful of annoyances. Hopefully, expanded content and modules will improve things. Once I've played around with the toolset, I'll revamp this review to include it.