User Rating: 7.5 | Neverwinter Nights PC
The single player campaign for “Neverwinter Nights” is fun and enjoyable, but you can’t help but be frustrated by thinking about what it could have been. This game could have been a perfect 10, like Baldurs Gate 2 or the old Gold Box games with fancy graphics and a slick interface. All of the previous Bioware/Black Isle Dungeons and Dragons computer games have had a great single-player campaign. However, for Neverwinter Nights, the single-player campaign was carved up and watered down to make it Mod friendly and multi-player friendly. The highlight of this game is really its engine and its interface. The interface is a critical yet under-appreciated aspect of every RPG, and NWN has maybe the best ever made. Every task is just a few intuitive mouse-clicks away, and customization is a snap. You can set up a whopping 36 hot keys, by using the 12 F keys, and then the F keys in combination with Shift or Ctrl. This makes for gameplay that is efficient and never bogs down. Radial menus allow you to quickly access actions that are not hot-keyed, and your inventory comes up quickly on the main screen. As a whole, the controls are very easy to use, and they are very refined. There simply aren’t any long inventory rearrangement sessions or menu hunts in this game. It’s impossible to overstate how important that is. The graphics, for the most part, are very good. Faces are somewhat blocky and featureless, but the rest of the character parts look great. Your character looks dramatically different, depending upon what he is wearing and using. Battle animations are impressive and fun to watch. The best aspect of the graphics though, has to be the game’s magic effects. Playing a wizard is fun just to see all the neat eye candy. Fireballs, lightning bolts, acid clouds, and magic missiles look fantastic. Most areas look great when you first enter them, although the use of cookie-cutter tile sets gets boring after a while. Artwork in NWN is almost nonexistent. There aren’t any unique, unforgettable areas like there have been in the other recent D&D games (like Watchers Keep in “Throne of Bhaal”). The soundtrack for Neverwinter Nights is one of my favorites of all time. Jeremy Soule put together another masterpiece for this game. The theme song is beautiful, and so are a lot of the ambient pieces in the game, like the temple music. There are also a few really rousing battle songs in the game, especially for some of the boss battles. In general, the sound is very good. The main storyline for the game is mediocre, but it makes up for it in a lot of ways. There is one major side plot in the game which is interesting, unpredictable, and somewhat tragic. There are a lot of very creative and interesting side quests in the game. One sidequest requires that you collect bounties on criminals by retrieving their ears. Another requires you to be the defense attorney in a murder trial. It’s too bad that the creativity shown for the side quests isn’t in the game’s main quest. Unfortunately, this game plays a lot like Diablo when it comes to the action, and that is not a compliment. I am simply baffled by the amount of games that have Diablo envy, and this game is one of the worst offenders. For starters, you just play a single character, and you can only get help from one dumb henchman, whose inventory and actions you can’t control. The AI for your henchman is non-existent, so you are best off just picking a melee bashing machine to join you. Many areas are populated with endless hordes of low-level enemies that you slice through until you come to one or two boss characters. Along the way, you break open chests. And more chests. And more chests. And more chests. And then more chests. This game has eight trillion chests. Everywhere you look there is a small pile of gold under a rock, or some item of randomly generated junk. Most of the magic items in the game are randomly generated, and have absolutely no charm or character to them. During Chapter 1, you find a bunch of low-level magic items, and in Chapter 2, you find the same set of magic items with slightly higher modifications, sorta like Diablo. And then there is the Portal Stone, which is simplified version of the “Town Portal” scroll from Diablo. The Portal Stone allows you to escape from anywhere at any time to get back to town, and it simply had no business being in this game. Baldur’s Gate 2 is a much better role-playing game, and Icewind Dale 2 is a much better tactical combat game. In order to enjoy “Neverwinter Nights”, you have to forget that it is Dungeons and Dragons, and instead judge it on its own merits. When you do that, you will see that it is fun and enjoyable. It’s hard for me to stop wishing that this game had been a 6-character, non-liner RPG. “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” looks like an indicator of what “Neverwinter Nights” could have been if Bioware had wanted to make a great single-player experience.
