A balanced (if somewhat flawed) addition to its genre, Nox is great fun to play, over and over again.
For those of you who love to label: Nox is a third-person action RPG, set in a fantasy world of the same name, far distant from (or possibly parallel to) our own. If you choose not to customize your character when starting a new game, you control Jack, the trailer-trash white boy who was drawn to Nox by the mystic powers of a magical artifact he used to keep on top of his TV. The game offers three distinct single-player campaigns and a host of options for multiplayer mayhem; players can compete over Westwood Online or over a local area network, if they're connected to one. I'll first discuss the game's single-player mode in detail; after that I'll shed some light on the multiplayer modes and the Quest add-on.
Rather than forcing the player to choose between good and evil (a la Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), Nox instead allows you to choose between three very differing professions. The world of Nox is divided into three separate factions: the strong, lionhearted Warriors (led by the Warlord Horrendous); the cunning, mystical Conjurers (represented by Master Conjurer Aldwyn) and the crafty, magically adept Wizards (taught by the Grand Wizard Horvath). The Wizards and Warriors are opposite halves of an age-old blood feud, while the Conjurers maintain a sort of moral middle ground between them. Each of these three 'classes' has its own strengths and weaknesses; no class can be said to be 'best', but the hands-on approach often necessary when playing a Warrior may appeal to some players more than the stealthy tactics that a Wizard is most often forced to rely on, for example.
The single-player campaigns are divided into chapters and all follow essentially the same story; the first three chapters are unique to each class and take the player through the steps necessary to become established in the profession of their choice (for Warriors this consists of running 'The Gauntlet', a series of grueling physical tests; for Conjurers it means charming and banishing several demons from an underground mine; Wizards must locate Horvath's apprentice in addition to retrieving several artifacts for him). From the fourth chapter, however, the story becomes the same per class: find out if the Necromancer queen Hecubah is raising the dead to do her bidding and assemble an ultimate weapon to stop her.
The game's mechanics are greatly reminiscent of Diablo & Diablo II in that the game sports a point-and-click interface by default, allowing you to walk, run and attack with the same button. Unfortunately, because the game assumes that you are not going to be moving and interacting with anything at the same time, it isn't possible to move & shoot, making clever 'hit-and-run' attacks on large groups of monsters with a ranged weapon or quick spell impossible. This can become frustrating when there is a huge, slow golem bearing down on you and the crossbow that could probably kill it in a few hits forces you to stand completely still after every shot, not even allowing you to cast a defensive spell, for long enough to allow said golem to catch up and pound you into the ground with a single blow.
Something relatively ground-breaking (although by no means novel) is the game's line-of-sight system. It realistically mimics human eyesight by painting areas behind solid objects black. With the exception of magically erected walls, you won't be able to see anything coming if it's coming from behind an obstacle.
The player has access to up to five spells (as a Wizard or Conjurer) or abilities (as a Warrior) at a time; these can be bound to any five keys you like. I have mine set to NumPad 7, 4, 5, 1 and 2 (so I can use the up arrow to move forward and the Enter, Shift and NumPad 0 keys to jump, invert spell targets (useful for healing allies, for example, as a Wizard or Conjurer) and switch weapons respectively), but the standard 'ASDFG' setup may work better for you. As in a lot of areas, Nox allows the player freedom to customize. In addition to his five spell/ability slots, the player has access to three quick potion/item slots that can likewise be bound to keys of your choice: a Cure Poison slot, a Health slot and (for the magic users) a Mana slot. Pressing any of these keys will consume one of the corresponding items, if the player has any.
The game's AI is good for the time at which it was released (Q1of 2000), but lacking in some departments. For example, most monsters have a range of vision that is just barely smaller than your screen. This equates to being able to see them (and take a shot at them) well before they can do the same to you. And even when they do take offense at being nailed from afar with various sharp objects (if the first hit doesn't kill them on the spot), they'll be temporarily possessed by Rambo's one-man-army mentality and depart from their group (as you'll find most monsters languishing as part of a herd of their kind, with a few notable exceptions) in search of the offender, from which position you'll usually be able to slaughter them without interference. And if you're skillful or powerful enough to kill your target in one shot, the monsters left behind will not seek to avenge their dead buddy but will stand there like big gnarly sheep with swords and wait for the next blow to fall. Huh?
The game's friendly AI could use some tweaking, too. Often on your journeys you'll encounter citizens of Nox in various predicaments; by rescuing them from their grisly fates, you'll seal the bonds of friendship between you and they will follow you around everywhere, until they die or the game dictates that it's time for them to leave. You'll find lone Wizards in Ogre cages, Conjurers being torn to shreds by ravening black wolves, Warriors flocking to your side en masse to defend their home from the Undead. While the scripting is handled quite nicely and your allies can usually take care of themselves, they're prone to airheaded feats of stupidity, such as charging a mob of skeletons single- and empty-handed, or walking over a blatantly obvious trap and getting roasted, skewered and crushed several different ways before you can coax them out of danger by walking in the opposite direction. As a Conjurer, you'll frequently experience moments when a creature you have charmed or summoned goes out of its way to hunt down a pesky little underling that isn't worth the time spent killing it, only to either fail and be mobbed by crowds of said underling, or to succeed and attempt to return to your side over spike pits, traps and whatnot.
Under these small scabs of frustration, however, is an incredibly engaging gameplay experience. The game is an action RPG, so you'll spend more time going head-to-head with hordes of hostiles than you'll spend making careful choices concerning your character, but the role-playing aspect of the game serves its purpose well. Your character's inital appearance isn't quite as customizable as some other games (you're limited to a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers in the beginning, as well as being able to choose your skin color, hair color and hair style), and the kinds of armor you can wear are limited by your choice of profession (Warriors can wear the heavy metal, Conjurers can don leather armor and Wizards have to make do with robes), but you still retain a certain feeling of freedom when choosing your character's attire.
Interspersed throughout baddie-bashing sessions and plot-advancing cutscenes (which the game's engine handles efficiently) are several mild puzzles. Nothing so fiendish as The Legend Of Zelda or as immersive as Myst; most of the puzzles require a few simple leaps of logic and either timing, knowledge of your environment or both. They usually involve keys (of varying metals and precious gems) and switches (ones you can activate by shooting, ones you need to operate by hand or ones you can activate by placing a suitably heavy object atop them) and are necessary to advance to the next area.
The game's level design is, in a word, brilliant. Environments come to life as remote villages, imperturbable castles and subterranean fortresses bustle with civilian activity; swamps buzz with (sometimes harmful) insect and plant life; crypts creak and groan and are rife with bones and spiderwebs (and sometimes more). There are numerous secret areas to be found and exploited; hidden behind fragile walls or across flaming pits of magma. Some areas force you to retrace your steps after hitting a switch or grabbing a key; some areas are utterly dark and prevent you from seeing the small cross in the ground that denotes an imminent pitfall until it's too late (or until you cast a light-shedding spell); rocks fall from the ceiling in unstable mines and elevators (of various descriptions) grind and click as they convey you up and down.
Westwood added a large dose of individual realism to the actors in the game; items make distinctive sounds when used or dropped (for example, the glassy clink of a bottle filled with potion as opposed to the sharp metallic clang of a sword hitting the wall or the ground), enemies appear and are dispatched in a similar fashion (zombies fall to the ground and will get up again if not incinerated; skeletons rise from coffins and burst into a pile of bones and armor; wolves leap from hidden dens and keel over with an almost pitiful whimper; demons stride over lava flows and explode in a blaze of brimstone). Even the civilian population of Nox is brought to life well; people in the street will make conversation when prompted; Wizard shopkeepers will respond with distaste towards a Warrior; you will even be harassed when walking as a Warrior in the Wizards' citadel of Galava (and arrested, whether or not you respond with force).
The weapons you can wield are also of admirable design; they range from simple swords and staves (with or without various enchantments) to throwing stars, bows and arrows; from maces, axes and great hammers to staves with powerful spellcasting abilities (notables such as the Conjurer's Force Of Nature staff or the Wizard's Lightning staff come to mind). Thanks to the liberal application of adjectives and enchantments, the list of items you can acquire while playing is nearly endless (items range from 'Flimsy' to 'Mighty' to 'Divine' in durability and carry enchantments such as 'of the Tick' (vampirism), 'of Embers' (fire) and 'of Collison' (knockback)). As with armor, some classes restrict the use of certain weapons. Also, some weapons work better than others against certain foes: giant mechanical machines of war are immune to fire, as are certain breeds of demon; a spider or scorpion will show far better resistance to poison than a human bandit. However, barring a certain sense of logic, discovering these weaknesses and wards is largely a matter of trial and error, and often you'll waste a lot of ammunition or mana on an approach that doesn't work before getting smoked and realizing that there might be a better way to go about doing it.
Unfortunately, going about doing it differently can be a pain sometimes, due to Nox's user-unfriendly inventory system. Rather than use a logical 'this item goes here, that one goes there' system like Diablo, Nox makes the player scroll through pages of square slots to find each item. This may actually be my greatest complaint concerning the game's mechanics; often I left myself with a sub-par weapon because I couldn't be bothered to find a better one in the labyrinthine folds of my inventory. You're allowed a single slot for a secondary weapon, which you can switch to and from at the press of a key, but even this system is flawed; you can equip a shield, for example, as a Warrior, but if you switch to a two-handed weapon like a hammer or halberd, you'll need to manually re-equip the shield after you switch back. A Conjurer's bows require slightly less maintenance; they will automatically find a quiver and equip it if you don't select one prior to firing.
All in all, and despite several minor flaws, Nox provides an engaging, addictive single-player experience with a not-too-steep learning curve, while requiring some ingenuity to come up with effective strategies (imbuing a small, voracious creature with a stationary cloud of poison gas and a spell that forces the target to remain still remains one of my favorite tactics as a Conjurer). However, once you've seen the three campaigns through, you'll be tired of Hecubah's menacing, lightly suggestive tones and the continual assault of exploding fireballs on your eardrums. For the game's real replay value, Nox die-hards can turn to its multiplayer functionality and the Nox Quest add-on.
In its simplest form, multiplayer Nox is a slag-fest between two or more players; they choose a class, create a character (in a similar way to starting a single-player campaign) and jump in with a few weapons and all the skills or spells for their class available to them. Additional game modes come in the form of Capture The Flag (do I really need to explain this?), FlagBall (like soccer, in a way, but with violence, and flags instead of goals), Elimination (last man standing is the winner) and a game mode reminiscent of King-of-the-Hill: one player is 'It', and gains points for each second he stays 'It', the others all get points for killing him (and by doing so, become 'It' themselves).
When pitted against each other (by human players), the strengths and weaknesses of each particular class are even more easily distinguishable. Warriors, with their heavy metal armor, become easy prey to a Wizard's Lightning spells, and their general inability to mix it up successfully with large groups of opponents puts them at a disadvantage when facing a skilled Conjurer. However, they deal the greatest direct damage per attack and possess two methods of closing the gap between themselves and a fleeing spellcaster (Berserker Charge and Harpoon), as well as a way to defend against spells in their immediate vincinity (War Cry). Wizards have to rely on stealth and deceptive tactics to succeed over the other two classes, because face-to-face with either of them, they just don't have the raw physical prowess or armor-wearing capabilities to keep up. However, with powerful spells like Fireball and Death Ray, obstacle-creating spells like Wall and Lock, stealth spells like Invisibilty, and the ability to create deadly traps, teleport to safety or become temporarily invulnerable, an adept Wizard can be a major headache for his opponents. Conjurers, with their comparatively thin leather armor, will have to stay on their toes to avoid direct damage and fire spells (as fire does extra damage to leather armor in a way similar to electricity versus metal) and pick off their foes at range with bow and arrow while their 'pets' harrass the enemy up close and personal.
Finally, before I get into the technical aspects of Nox's gameplay, I'll go into what was for me, and presumably for other content-hungry Nox fans as well, a breath of fresh air: Westwood's Nox Quest add-on. This expansion pack was released together with the version 1.2 patch and was available at no cost. Since its release, however, Westwood.com has become a referral link to EA's Command & Conquer page, and the expansion executable has become rather hard to come by (I got mine from FileShack; it's presumably still out there somewhere).
Nox Quest is a single- and multiplayer add-on that allows you to adventure through several entirely new but familiar maps (styled after, for example, the Temple of Ix or the Underworld from the single-player game), alone or with up to six people at once, while facing seemingly endless hordes of monsters and some positively devious puzzles. In contrast to single-player mode, the object of Quest mode is to find the exit and advance to the next stage, destroying as many monster-summoning Obelisks as you can along the way. Level design is even more intuitive than it was in the original game, with puzzles that sometimes require skills particular to each class (for example, while adventuring as a Conjurer I came across a door that wouldn't open and a quartet of pressure panels in the floor; it was impossible to keep all four activated and walk through the door to the significant amount of treasure beyond, and I had to summon four small creatures and force one to remain still on each plate before the way forward was laid bare). For those of you who moaned about the lack of a co-op mode for Nox when it was first released; your waiting has paid off. And it was well worth the wait, in my opinion.
In conclusion, I'll cast a glance at the rating bars at the bottom of the 'Write a Review' page and give my reasons for the ratings I gave. Nox' gameplay receives a big, fat 9, simply because of the fun I had running through crypts and towns and dungeons in my leather duds and bow (or plate mail and sword, or robes and staff), slaughtering hordes of monsters and saving the day (with one seriously bad mother of an ultimate weapon. But I'll leave that discovery to you). The graphics get the lowest passing grade, a 6, because I've seen better within this genre. Not that they aren't impressive for a game from 2000, but what can I say? I'm a perfectionist. Sound gets a 7, because although it outscores a lot of games in both musical score and sound effects, the sounds get repetitive and boring after prolonged periods of gaming. As far as quality goes, though, Nox sounds top-notch. Speaking in terms of overall value, Nox scores an 8, for its combination of solid gameplay, good replay value and neglible flaws in AI, graphics and sound. 8.2 pretty much says everything that remains to be said about Nox; if you haven't already, go out and buy it!
CK