Neverwinter Nights 2: Gamespy Review: 4/5 Stars

Gamespy has updated last week's quick review with a much more comprehensive look at the game. Scoring Neverwinter Nights 2 with four out of five possible stars and a "Great" rating, the review is accompanied by several screenshots.

Obsidian has very effectively drawn on its legacy to make Neverwinter Nights 2's packaged single-player campaign worthy of its exhaustive pedigree. The game's story is epic in scope and far-reaching in magnitude, making up for its relatively slow start with a handful of surprises sure to excite fans of D&D's venerable mythology. Your character starts out as a simple orphan from a backwater village, though once the story gets going, you'll find yourself flirting with royalty, foiling inter-planar assassination plots, and ultimately locking horns with foes of nigh-divine proportions. And that's only half the story -- built into the game's intricate dialog system are plenty of moral choices for you to make, many of which radically alter the factions you end up allying with and determine how well regarded you are by those close to you.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to talk about Neverwinter Nights 2 without mentioning the performance issues that marred it at launch, and are as of yet unresolved. During our review, we encountered a fairly serious bug that we described at length last week in our updated Out of the Box piece. At press time, Obsidian is yet to release an update that addresses this issue, though they have offered a workaround that seems to remedy it in most cases.

A more pervasive issue, however, is the game's shaky performance. Currently, it's hard to make the game run at an acceptable clip unless you tone down some of the more flashy graphics options. Even with everything turned on, the game doesn't look particularly astounding; it's serviceable enough, though you're not likely to be very impressed, especially if you run it at a level that will grant decent performance. Finally, the game's camera takes a good deal of getting used to, and even once you're fully acclimated, you'll find yourself wishing a simple mouselook feature had been implemented.