Hail Flavius

"don't expect much"
Electronic Arts simply isn't known for putting out good games of this type. Their money seems to be on sports games. Anyway, I got Nox at the bargain bin price. The game is solo action pseudo-rpg. Buy this game if you want to help Amazon out.

"An Excellent Game"
This game was excellent and fun to play. The game from Westwood has you choose from being a wizard, conjurer, or warrior, and fight off Hecubvah and her evil necromancers.
The game has good graphics and it keeps you busy playing it. You can play the solo and defeat Hecubah or you can go online and play with other people.

"Fun game, good value"
Nox is a fun little game. What it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for with excellent gameplay and performance. Considering how low the price is for this game now, it is definitely worth buying.

The storyline for this game is linear, but each of the levels are large and have a lot of areas to explore. The theme of the game is kind of light-hearted and cartoonish. You walk around the levels, hacking or shooting or zapping monsters, finding keys, and breaking open stuff for goodies. In between levels, you can usually visit merchants to buy new stuff and get your equipment repaired.

There's nothing really original there. Where Nox excels is in some other areas in which other games often fail:

1. The graphics, animation, and sound for this game are excellent. Each room has a bunch of small objects to interact with, although most of them are things that you don't need. Still, if you want to, you can smash wine barrels for the heck of it and push rocks around.

2. The interface is easy to use and fits the fast-paced gameplay very well. There are hotkeys for three potions, five spells, and two weapons.

3. The game is short, but it is genuinely replayable. At the beginning of the game, you choose one of three distinct character classes. The beginning missions for each class are totally different. The later missions are the same, but each class has such distinct abilities that you have to play them somewhat differently.

4. The inventory system was refreshingly un-tedious. Maybe it's not realistic, but it's a nice break from the routine of constantly rearranging your inventory.

5. The game actually has good gold balance. What I mean by this is that you don't end up the game with a ton of gold and nothing good to spend it on. You get progressively more useful items at each level, but they cost more. Each time you spend gold, you can usually buy one or two things that you want, but you have to spend your money wisely.

NOX is a fun game to play. Its short length and shallow, linear plot are the reason that it gets four stars instead of five.

"Fast, funny, and heaps of fun!"
While sitting in his trailer in a Florida trailer park, Jack Mower (along with his TV!) is suddenly sucked through a vortex into the quasi-medieval world of Nox. There he finds he's the only person who can rid that world of the evil and malevolent sorceress, Hecubah, and he can't go home until he does. He can choose to follow the path of the warrior, conjurer or wizard, each with its own attributes, skills and challenges. Your character is always male, but if you have something against the name Jack, you can change it, along with other physical attributes.

I started out as a warrior, because that's usually the easiest character to play in these adventure/RPG hybrid games, since you have plenty of brawn to hack and slash your way through the foes, while toting about practically everything you come across. It soon became apparent that enough money to enable purchase of the really cool stuff is hard to come by, especially if you want to keep your weapons and armour in good shape. Even if you tote about all you can carry, it doesn't raise much when you get to a shop. Also, one of the areas is practically impossible to negotiate without ranged weapons, which are prohibitively expensive, and you don't find many on corpses or in chests. The warrior has no magic skills at all and is dependent on food and potions for healing and curing. You can only carry a limited amount at once and you always seem to run out at critical moments.

I left my warrior in the castle and started out again as a conjurer, as I'd read in some reviews that this is the most diverse and interesting character to play. Well, I haven't played as a wizard, and probably won't, but playing the conjurer is great fun. You visit the same places, but have quite different challenges and meet different people. A conjurer can use bows, crossbows and staves, can wear leather armour (some you find in the latter stages are pretty cool) and has heaps of offensive, defensive and healing magic at his disposal. The most interesting spell enables you to charm animals to assist you and later you can even summon them to help. Your great mid-game foe, the mimic, is a worthy ally when summoned, especially against the vampire lichs. In one of Nox's great ironies, monsters in the conjurer game drop heaps of ranged weapons that a warrior would kill for, but which are useless to the conjurer and raise hardly any cash. I'd advise not to buy arrows, as you find more than enough in the latter stages and you can use the cash for better purposes. And carry a few spare sets of armour into the final chapter, as you'll go through it quickly and any armour is better than none.

Nox has often been compared with Diablo, and while I can see why that comparison can be drawn, I would liken it more to Revenant. Like Revenant, it has a good story line, very impressive graphics, and a very simple control system. But it leaves both Diablo and Revenant floundering in its wake, since it has a pleasing amount of gameplay, acceptable voice acting, challenging (but not impossible) puzzles, and a satisfactory ending. I wasn't having much success in the final showdown, so I restored and tried a different approach (always take note of your latest find - it's often a clue to defeating your next foe). That time Hecubah could not withstand the concerted attack, and after a great little final cut scene, Jack (and the TV) were restored to Earth.

I'd read that Nox is very fast, and boy, was that an understatement. Battles in this game, particularly in the latter stages, needs amazing reflexes, something I'm not overly endowed with. However, I am blessed with cunning and persistence, and after my character died three or four (or even ten) times, I'd managed to figure out the puzzle, or a good strategy against the monster(s). Some of the later monsters move with lightning speed, often only needing one hit to splatter Jack and his gear all over the screen, so a well-positioned charmed or summoned ally makes an excellent distraction, allowing Jack the nanosecond needed to get off a good shot or spell (I didn't have much success with bombs).

I loved Nox, but since I've revised my personal scoring system, I can only give it 4 stars. I'm saving 5 for that really unforgettable game, and although Nox was great fun, it really was too similar to Diablo and Revenant to outscore them.