Pros: Great quests and puzzlles. good story. good interactivity with NPCs.
Cons: some graphics issues and not a strategic fighting game really.
The Bottom Line: If you got the first two, you should reaally get this one. I din't care for the second one all that much, but this one brought me back.
dmarusz's Full Review: Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark (Expan...
At first, I was going to give this game 5 stars, graded on a curve. For an expansion pack, it is well beyond what's normally given. Then, I was enjoying the game so much that I thought that it just plain deserved 5 stars. Now, I'm back to giving this 5 stars for being a great expansion pack. If you would like to know why, come gentle listeners, while we go through the ups and downs of a game I like to call Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. Apparently, so to does everyone else.
There are several things that the third installment of Neverwinter Nights (NWN) does which are improvements over its predecessors, probably making it the best of the three. The first rivaled it, but wasn't quite there. The second was quite a let down. You felt like you were playing a mod, not an expansion pack, and a so-so mod at that.
The first improvement that I'll point out is the party system. You finally don't have a wizard who blows all of his spells on the first wolf that attacks you. I felt like it was actually worth having members to hang around instead of trying to figure out how to constantly keep them alive. Your party seems to be a little easier to organize as well. There still are a few bugs, like the fact that they can't walk out of an acid cloud without you leading the way, but better.
At one point in the game you get to fight with an entire army. You can't micro-manage the army but you can give out orders to the units leaders. This has almost an RTS feel to it, although it keeps more in the Role Playing Game mentality. A great stroke of genius completed by whoever thought of it.
The action/fighting in the game outside of a fun few moments aren't revolutionary. It looks like the Dungeons and Dragons rule set still hasn't translated well to real time games, and seems best suited for turn based. The rules may never work fantastically. The outcome of this poor to mediocre translation is fairly stale gameplay when it comes to action. There is really no real strategy involved. It essentially boils down to good armor, weapons and buffs. I guess you can use these three in a slightly strategic way, but I found keeping vast amounts of healing potions on hand to be more effective. Even the spells have a cushioned impact. They may be there, but I couldn't feel/experience them in a concrete way. Offensive spells seemed almost useless to pursue. The end product is just another action game.
Where it wins back some of its RPG points are the quests, the second improvement. In this game, they are good to excellent. They finally figured out how to rival a Baldur's Gate or Betrayal at Krondor quest. They even have some great puzzles that are on par with your classic adventure games. Of course, as a side note, it's possible to scratch your head and get as frustrated as you would with a classic adventure game puzzle, sometimes even let down by the answer. But, that's part of the puzzle experience. The puzzles and quests really do the most at lifting this game to a high status.
If you have played the first two games of this series, you'll probably know that they have great sound effects, mood music, visual effects and art. This game is no different. These guys really know what they are doing, and they're polished. As far as the visuals go, they have pinned down the translucent energy effects that come with buffs or spells or just letting someone get hit by lightning. I think that this is one of the main reasons that all of the games under the NWN umbrella are so well graded in the game review magazines. You won't be let down by this.
Nonetheless, there are a few problems. I noticed with my visual settings jacked up, there was some spottiness and texture mistakes. I'm assuming it was an incompatibility with my video card. However, I have a GeForce card, not some offbeat brand. It shouldn't have that much problems. I eventually set my dials to almost as low as they'd go, but I still got lag in some areas. Generally, it showed up in larger areas. I think it may have even created a major bug, and subsequent crash at one point (which I had to reload over and over until finally I go through the area.)
The game itself is not a vast world. They use many small spaces and connect them through doors. Even though I miss the big spaces, they do a bang up job. They use them to their advantage by applying them to nice tight quests or short searches. You don't feel like your dungeon crawling for hours just to get a little scrap of enjoyment at an anticlimactic ending.
The one backfire to the small spaces is that the designers seemed to feel that they had to add artificial lengtheners to the gameplay. You have the typical heavy and bulky inventories where you spend much of your time selling and buying things as opposed to playing the meat of the game. They like winding you around through doors as well, where you end up devoting mucho time to loading the next area.
One improvement which alleviates some of the game lengthening are these things called rogue stones which you can expend in order to teleport back to places that you have been or where you died. The resurrection is a great idea. No reason to go to your last save after every death, and in this game there are more than a few. It works well in the teleporting regime, too. Unfortunately, the rogue stones cost a significant amount of money which acts as a convenient money sink that some players would balk at trying to spend as opposed to saving up for something else. And, in the last part of the game you are not allowed to teleport. You get to revert back to the crawl and dredge.
The funny part about these add-ons, is that the game doesn't need them. It will play very well without them, with sufficient playing time. I know that game hours are lauded by commercial game reviewers, but it's not that important to me. In this case, by taking these things out, you may shorten the game, but it would add value to replay-ability. As it is now, I probably will take my time before playing this game again or I may never. If they took out the bulky inventories and made a streamlined transportation, I would be excited as we speak about playing this game again.
What does work very well is the story and its meshing with the gameplay. The story starts off a little slow and perhaps a tad trite, but it picks up fast, and keeps going until you realize that you are not even playing in the same tale that you originally started. It's almost like 3 stories in one, with the exception that they use the stories to build off of each other give an epic plot.
The interactivity between play and plot comes via the previously hailed quests. The quests are relevant, reflecting the story as opposed to side-bars. They cinch all things together. They also do a good job of varying quests, so that it's just not the same one over and over again with a different name. Most times, these quests involve action which is just another way that this game interweaves all of its parts.
That's the NWN's strength. It uses all of its parts together to make an overall satisfying experience. It's also why I give it 5 stars. As an expansion pack, it's one of the best. It has its flaws, but Bioware gives us great ending to a trilogy.
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