Neverwinter Nights 2: IGN Review of NWN 2: 8.5/10 "Great"

The immersion factor created by the voice acting and narrative is augmented by a stellar orchestral soundtrack. Great battle music is complemented by excellent tracks full of moaning strings and ethereal vocals. Enemies scream and hiss during battle, spells crackle across the screen, and weapons clang against armor. Companion acknowledgements can get repetitive, however, as they call out a limited array of phrases whenever selected.

Neverwinter Nights 2 has some steep system requirements, which is somewhat puzzling given the graphical return. Character models range form plain to flat out bad. Some of the monster designs are interesting and the armor sets are detailed, but it's difficult to tell exactly what the game is doing that requires such processing power. Most of the environments are boring to look at. Even Neverwinter itself is dull in appearance, with repetitive housing designs and blocky, sparse interior spaces. The game only looks good when spells are being flung around, which are far and away the most attractive effect the game has to offer. Without spells onscreen, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a slightly above average looking game with an inconsistent framerate on most systems out there. Even on high-end rigs with all the graphical effects cranked, it still doesn't look very good unless bits of magic are flying across the screen.

While playing through we came upon a few bugs. Though none severely hampered our gameplay experience, they did ruin the illusion of immersion in a few cases. During a few of the letterboxed cutscenes characters had the occasional tendency to walk completely out of the frame, meaning we were staring at a wall while a conversation was going on. During others, characters would turn and address the wrong character. At one point while engaged in a text only conversation with an NPC, voice clips of a cut scene from a previous part of the game triggered every time we clicked on a response. We also encountered a few instances where cut-scenes didn't activate properly, forcing us to reload our game. The second time through, it worked.