Others say...

"Neverwinter Nights Gold"
Enter a world of magic and adventure in Neverwinter Nights Gold Edition. This pack includes both the original Neverwinter Nights and the Shadows of Unrentide Expansion. This game is a RPG with both single and multiplayer modes. It is my opinion that this exciting game is well worth your money and time.
The storyline of this game is well-developed and the characters fill their roles well. The campaign also includes many sidequests so you can take a break from the main story. Much freedom is given to how you create your character and how you go along with the storyline. Also, your inventory is easy to use and you are easily able to access anything you carry.
This is a fun and versatile game that is definitely worth playing.

"These people are unworldly"
Now, first off I'd like to say that this game is too incredible for any non-D&D player to experience. If you don't play D&D, go kill monsters in diablo or something...
I was once told that D&D was created after Diablo. I almost cried in my computer chair...well...not really, but I was getting angry. Now, this game is indeed incredible, and they did indeed do an outstanding job at turning D&D into a computer game. I was satisfied with their skill system, their feat system, the combat system, the controls, the monsters, and the character creation. It felt like I was playing D&D, except that I couldn't roleplay.
Using spells and skills is really easy, and you can assign them to hotkeys which make accessing them much easier. You can attack, use skills, and do many other actions by right-clicking on the target, such as pick-pocketing (Which I thought they did a marvelous job at), and you can even use the Hide in Shadows skill to hide from NPC's, and other players online.
The gameplay is really nice, making everything about the game really fun. They really stayed true to the D&D rules (Which I did NOT expect), monsters, and magic items. Moving around is easy, combat is easy, and everything else is just great. Really the only thing that I could find bad about the game is that everytime you enter a new area you have to wait for it to load.

You start the game by creating a character (and you can customize every bit of it too), and then immediatley entering the game.
The only real downside to the game is that you can only have one character, although you can hire a henchman.

Alright, I know that this review isn't professional, and it wasn't very clear, but what I'm trying to say through it all is-If you are a D&D table-top player, and you're looking for a D&D game, you won't find any better than this.

It'll probably be tricky for Non-D&D players to learn (but you shouldn't be playing this game unless you table top), but if you know the 3rd edition rules, then there's nothing else to know :)

So, once again, if you are a tabler-topper, then this is YOUR game.

ROCK AND ROLL D&D!!!!!!



"Excellent game with a cool toolset feature"
Neverwinter Nights has been around for a couple of years now with the two expansion packs merely extending and expanding the life of an already excellent genre-best game.

My biggest complaints with this game have always been only being able to create a single character, and relatively weak henchmen. You could not upgrade the NPC hireling's equipment, nor could you form a true party of guys and gals you created.

In Shadows Of Unrentide you don't have this problem. It's ridiculously easy if you use your character from the original game. I've played it for a few hours and have been fighting Kobolds, wolves, skeletons, and a few bears. Not much challenge for a level 12 Rogue/3 Fighter/ 5 Harper Scout, really. My henchman is the Half Orc Barbarian/Wizard and he's got almost 200 hit points. I expect that although I'll enjoy the quest side of this expansion, that I'll have to wait until Hordes of the Underdark before I get challenging combat again.

The graphics are nice and the music is excellent, you really can't find anything that's not outstanding in the presentation aspect of this game.

The toolset is also an interesting feature. You can make a basic little fun game without to much fuss, but if you want to make your own hirelings, make portals work, etc. you'll need a good grasp of programming language. Cutting and pasting scripts from other modules may not work, especially if they are made to work with a hak pack that you downloaded specifically for the aforementioned game. You can easily make hacked equipment. I had a 1st-level fighter taking out Ancient dragons with one or two hits because he had armor/items that made him immune to everything, and weapons that did all sorts of crazy fire/ice/electrical/acid/negative energy/positive energy/sonic, etc. damage to enemies. Cheating like that normally ruins a game, but it was funny to watch when I tried it out.

Yeah.

Now if only it had Drizzt Do'Urden or a few of the Forgotten Realms heroes or villains in it...

"This Rocks!"
For some reason, this was sitting on my shelf unopened for months. I recently installed it and started to play it and realized how much fun I was missing. I loved the Dungeon Siege and Diablo games and was looking for something like those and here it was sitting on the shelf all this time. Installation took a few CDs but was fairly quick and error-free. The graphics are great, the music is appropriate and sets the mood, and the sound effects are good too. Controlling your character needs a little getting used to but its fun seeing your hero battle it out especially if you choose a "short" character like a gnome. RPG and D&D fans should delight at all the possible customizations available. I would have liked to be able to control a larger party of say 6 characters for more firepower and seeing their different abilities side by side but this is just a small quibble. Until Dungeon Siege 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2 arrive, Neverwinter Nights Gold should suffice til then. If not, I guess I'll get the expansion pack, Hordes of Underdark, too.

"hack-n-slash maybe, but still great fun!"
I like this game a lot. Forgive the length of this review - this is a long game, which has a lot of elements.

For starters, the sounds are excellent. The voice-overs are a little goofy; I get a little tired of Tomi's "hokey-dokie!", but the sound effects are very nice. The music is simply outstanding, and very well written. I especially like the musical trigger, which changes the soundtrack when you are going into battle.

Visuals are outstanding as well. There should be enough eye-candy to satisfy most critics (weather effects, shadows, and a wide range of item art).

Game control is generally straight-forward. There is a tutorial which walks you thru the basic game mechanics. But really, most RPGs have the same generic features - character development, inventory management, maps and notebooks, and so on. It's not too hard to figure out to press "i" to bring up your inventory screen, or to click on an NPC to talk to them.

Camera control is a bit tricky. There are three modes - chase, top down and driving mode. The game defaults to chase mode, which automatically rotates the screen. I found myself getting a little queazy, as the screen would rotate, so changed it to top down mode. All that means is that I have to spin the screen manually.

You might need to spend some time in screen rotation and zooming, due to the way the game sometimes puts plot items right underneath another object. I often end up clicking on an avatar and getting a dialogue box, rather than examining the item I want.

As a small side note, there are WAY too many crates/barrels/boxes in the game, in places you don't expect to see them. A lot of them are locked, and a lot of those are trapped. It gets to be tedious, because you really want to search all the areas, in case there is a signficant plot item.

The campaign is pretty big. It's divided into four "chapters", but they're fairly longish. I've finished the OC (official, or original campaign) and the SoU expansion pack. I really don't know how long it took me to finish. I found the SoU expansion to be a little more fun in some areas, even tho it was a lot shorter. The SoU adds visual effects to plot items, and henchie inventory control, among other things.

It is kind of linear in play, and personally, I like that. In most non-linear games, I have a tendency to dawdle around or simply get lost without knowing what to do. The main storyline is fairly straight forward, but there are still a lot of side-quests you can tackle along the way, if you get bored of the story.

Others have said the game is too much hack-n-slash, but I like that. In all my RPGing, I always select the generic fighter type. So in this game, I chose a half-orc barbarian. I don't choose my character types based on lazyness. I know a lot of people would say choosing the big dumb brute is the easy way. But when you think about it, if you have to wade into five or six mobs with just your brute force, taking direct blows, it's just another style of strategy, which is the style I've been playing since the old C-64 Bards Tale games.

In any event, there are a huge number of items to find in the game - weapons, armor, magic items. Gold abounds. I was a little worried at the start of the game, trying to hire a henchman for 250gp, when all I had was 50gp in my pocket. But as soon as I started adventuring, that turned into a non-issue. The game-world is big enough that it does take a bit of time moving around from place to place.

I haven't played online yet, and am franky probably not going to even try. My online gaming experience was spoiled years ago thanks to Diablo, Battle.Net and wide-spread cheating. I know these newer games have methods to control stuff, but honestly, quite a lot of people I meet online are just plain jerks. I guess anonyminity tends to make people less polite to strangers which they'll never meet personally.