Marc Lim
On a magnificent sea voyage across the Trackless Sea, disaster strikes and you are shipwrecked on the beaches in the untamed jungles of Samarach. All that stands between your band of stalwart adventurers and a horde of hungry goblins is a trusty blade in your mail-clad hand or a few potent spells.Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir is the second installment to the best selling game developed by Obsidian Entertainment. Not content with just delivering a brand new expansion to an already solid title, Obsidian has given even the most jaded fans a new reason to return to the Forgotten Realms by redesigning the old and leaving what seems to be a whole new game in itself.
Storm of Zehir offers two new races, the Yuan-ti Pureblood and the Gray Orc as well as an extra base class, the Swashbuckler, and two new Prestige Classes, the Hellfire Warlock and the Doomguide.
Similar to the traditional pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game, players are free to explore their surroundings, instead of being herding from encounter to battle and back again. The recent addition has made attempts at adopting more free-form gameplay – giving players the chance to venture off the beaten path and find treasure in the undergrowth. If you ever wondered what was in that forest over there in the far off yonder, you can take a short trip and be surprised by what you find, be it a cache of precious gems or a brood of giant spiders waiting to ensnare you in their webs, sometimes both.
Storm of Zehir gives you the opportunity to explore the overland map, which is a miniaturised view of a section of the entire world in which Neverwinter Nights 2 takes place. Previously, skills such as survival, spot and search were relatively useless in the overall scheme of things, but with this addition, characters without high spot level will find themselves constantly under attack by wandering groups of marauding monsters, also, players who have a high survival level will find that they move faster over the overland map.
Another thing new to Storm of Zehir is the party system. In Neverwinter Nights 2, one only had the option to create your own personal character and play him/her through the entire game with several computer-controlled allies. Now in distant Samarach, from the very start you can create up to four separate characters to form your very own party.Especially with this option to create 4 separate characters, you can take hours to tinker with your characters to make them as real as you want, choosing your feats and skills to complement your entire team.
The UrbanWire chose to go wild with the character creation and started out with a two-weapon elf ranger, an Aasimar paladin, a half-orc fighter and a half-drow warlock. The game gives you the option to write out each of your character’s background and you can even choose your party’s name and motto. The UrbanWire deliberated on what would be a sufficiently regal and deadly sounding title and settled on the name of a comedic online comic, the Order of the Stick, as our party’s name.
In Storm of Zehir, who is in your party plays in important role in conversations with key people in the game. Certain characters will give players extra options in a conversation, while different races, skills and even genders result in different possible answers.
Also new to Neverwinter Nights 2 is the trading system. In Storm of Zehir, the player will work for a large trading consortium throughout the game, this new trading system gives players the option to create trade routes, caravans and earn money via trading resources with the various cities and towns on the overland map. This gives players further incentive to explore the map so as to expand their burgeoning trade empire.
However, as Storm of Zehir was made on the slightly buggy Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, a few flaws invariably crop up during the game. As the overland map itself is huge with so many things to explore, the loading times every time you enter a fight with a group of monsters will slow down the immersion factor considerably. Also, certain spells, which the players can cast on themselves to buff up fellow party members, will not carry on to the different encounters across the overland map. This is in contrary to the descriptions of the spells and can cause a lot of annoyance in having to keep casting these spell buffs at the start of every battle.
All in all, Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir is a fascinating game that does well to create an emphasis on party creation, and will definitely captivate players from start to finish as they discover the dark secret hidden in the jungles of Samarach.
Score:
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 8.5/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Addictive Rating: 6.5/10
Replay Value: 7/10
Overall Rating: 7.5/10
Neverwinter Nights 2 is developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Atari
and retails for S$39.90.