Neverwinter Nights 2: NWN 2 Review at Sci-Fi.com & Game Vortex

The first review comes from Game Vortex that scored NWN 2 95% and a "Top Pick":

Neverwinter Nights 2 does not stand out as a wonder of new innovation of gaming mechanics. But, what it does do is use the lessons of its previous successes to make a solid game. I don't think you can talk about the mechanics of Neverwinter Nights 2 without being clear that its mechanics are the culmination of KOTOR and the original Neverwinter Nights. You have the ability to pause the game at anytime and issue up to five commands to your party at a time. This allows you to instruct the A.I. to do specific tasks such as healing or casting spells, while never losing sight of your main goal as the player character.

Now I have gotten this far without talking about the tool set included in the game. Neverwinter Nights has a huge Mod community. There are hundreds of mods for the original game, and with the included tool set, there will no doubt be the same fan-generated content for this game as well. These tools allow you to continue and create any world you want and present it to a vast community to play and enjoy. Go to http://www.atari.com/nwn2/ to keep up with the modding community and their efforts. This alone will continue to give you hours of gameplay value added to an already well done storyline.

If you haven't guessed it by now, I love this game. With all of the side quests and twists, you are looking at hours of great gameplay. Create your own worlds or play other's creations and tack on even more. When I look at this game, I see many older mechanics from many games. But I also see strong gameplay with hundreds of hours of replayability. That is why for years, the original game was still being released on store shelves and played by thousands. This game, like the original, will probably only be surpassed by its sequel.

Sci-Fi.com has posted the second review of NWN 2 today. Scoring the game with a "C" rating (average), Matt Peckham said:

The problem with Neverwinter Nights 2 is that it wants to be two things at once, and those two things end up cooperating like fire and water. Take a complex ruleset mostly tamed by a commendably intuitive interface and wrap it around small, claustrophobic levels and a long, dull, predictable story that comes across as restrictive and linear to a fault, and you either have clashing design decisions or a game only patient D&D purists will find appealing.

On the one hand, NWN2 is probably the most ambitious attempt to date to simulate D&D on a computer, and if you want a computerized version of the ruleset with minimal deviation (mostly to accommodate things like combat rounds that have to run in real-time), here's your poison. But if you'd rather immerse yourself in a decent rip of a story that doesn't include wooden characters, endless FedEx quests and stuff to fight that stands around solely to go "EYAAH!" and charge when you get too close, then watch out. NWN2's campaign is like slogging through a particularly hackneyed Bob Salvatore yarn where you're just another unlikely zero-to-hero. Zero-to-hero is fine. Tired storytelling's not, especially since this is Feargus Urquhart we're talking about, the guy who turned Zeb Cook's somewhat obscure Planescape campaign setting into one of the best story-driven RPGs going.