Pretty good, but a feels unfinished. Hopefully Obsidian fixes the issues with a whole lot of patches.
Unfortunately I am not comeletely happy with theis game. Obsidian put out a very buggy, wait, beter to say, unfinished game. As someone who has played my share of PC games and loves them I am used to bugs, but this is beyond the exceptable limit, hence why I would called it unfinished instead of just buggy.
I am not really happy with the UI changes as of yet either. The changes Obsidian made wwere actually a step backwards and made control and navigation more of a chore.
The AI is touted as improved, but in the games release state I can tell you that you companions are retarded and will often charge ahead of you and get themselves killed. This is not only annoying but Obdisian added an even more annoying feature that prevents you from leaving the area without your companions. Meaning you have to fight the battle alone now and win, or else. Lame.
Your worst enemy in the game is the camera. In the old game I can remember having to move it all the time too but because everything was as large as it is in this NWN, you didn;t have much that blocked your view. In NWN2,..this are much better to scale grapically. Houses, and trees look like they should and aren't kind of tiny looking, this however means that a whole lot of stuff blocks your view and means you will constantly be having to move the camera like never before.
Oh there are other issues, but I don't want to get into them all, and of course some might be fixed, hiopefully, by future patches.
Graphically the game is much better looking than the first game. Anybody who says differenet is wrong. Is it as good as Oblivion? No. However what it makes up for in graphic prowess iy makes up in the depth of the DnD system which makes Oblivion's open class system seem like childs play since in effect classes are pretty much worthless. Here though,.they matter. and building an excellent character is more of an art. It is by far more difficult to build a great character than most other games, there is actually a strategy to it.
The story, though I haven't played as far into it as much as I would have liked, seems much better than NWN. Which was kind of bland. I can't comment on it too much though since I still have a ways to go.
The control is about the same,...except unresposive at times. I have seen times where my character after killing an enemy doesn't move to attack the next and I have to manually move him myself or he just stannd there and do nothing in attack position.
I haven't experinced any of the hardware issues some people have wrote about, but they seem to have a much more higher end system than I do. Soone when I have my new system up with Core2 Duo and 8800GTX's I might be seeing it fiorst hand for myself though.
The sound to me hasn't been mentioned in any review and I found that to be a disappointment as it just seems to be nothing but recycled from NWN.
I have not messed with the toolset much yet so I can't say much on it other than it appears to be more difficult to figure out than the old one which was very easy except for the scripting. But I'm glad it has it and I'm sure others will do just fine with it.
I can't comment on the multiplaer aspect because i haven't tried it personaly though I heard it was buggy from a friend. Which is huge dissapointment to hear since clearly multiplayer was the biggest draw of the first game and what gave it such a long lifespan.
Because NVN2 is a one of a kind game I am willing to look the other way and be patient for future patches to fix many of the problems it ships with.
If that happens this game will be for the most part at least as good as the old game, if not a little better. But honestly it should have been that way out the box.
However I want to rate the game as is and that being said I can't see this game as any higher than what I gave striaght out the box. With future patches I could easily seeing it go up to an 8.0 or higher, but that remains to be seen. The game not horrible though but as a massive fan of the original game and its expansions I was pretty upset with the state of the game as it shipped.
It isn't often that I would reccomend a game on potential alone, but this is one, for now that I would still tell people to buy.