Now, I am actually a fan of Neverwinter Nights 2 and thought the first expansion made the game was a definite step in the right direction story and character wise. This game however, is a stinky fucking turd. This expansion is a low budget piece of shit that never needed to be created. Honestly, to fund this game, everyone probably pooled whatever change they had in their pocket. So here we go....Storm of Shit..I mean Zehir.
Graphics: Ok so for the most part the graphics in this game are pretty similar to the previous iterations with slight improvements in certain areas. The cities that you can actually visit and pretty nice looking and detailed enough to feel like their is an improvement. You can tell that they have way more tilesets and prefab's to place all around the maps in this game versus the original. The overland map also looks really nice (OH NO DONT WORRY, I'll get to it) with having detail across the whole thing. The one thing that fucking sucks huge dog nads is that all the environments that you can actually visit are fucking smaller than my nuts. Seriously, every fucking cave, city or other random location that you visit is just absolutely fucking tiny, its pathetic. What the hell were they thinking when they designed that? YEAH, great idea, lets make abunch of small fucking tiny levels that have nothing in them but one or two guys. That is not fucking going back to your roots like they claimed....What happened to huge environments to explore like Dorn's Deep, Durlag's Tower, or The Watcher's Keep? I'll tell you where those went! In the fucking trash. Instead you walk to an area, and there is one or two guys for you to fight in a shitty cave. Other than that, the graphics are still pretty nice looking especially for the engine now which has become a bit dated but the rest of the graphics still hold.
Sound: Ok so one MAJORLY notable improvement is in the musical score. The music when you first start up the menu, or the main menu, or throughout the game just has been vastly improved. It has so much more atmosphere than previously and really gives a much better feeling than the music from the first game. That is about where the quality for the sound ends. The voice acting in this new expansion ranges from fucking pathetic to boil some oil so I can drown my brain in it and burn the memory from my skull. Seriously, whoever the fucking voice actor that they decided to hire to voice such an epic character as Volo should be uppercutted right in the throat. The voice acting sounds like a child wrote the shitty as dialog and then hire some pre-pubescent teenager to act as Volo. The rest of the voice acting is just fucking forgettable as your characters don't speak, and the dialog is fucking crap overall. Well, on the bright side, atleast they got the music sounding good!
Gameplay: Ok so the characters brought up some new ideas (and tried to re-hash some from the golden days) and then decided to smear it over with a nice shit laquer to give it that glossy coating. So first thing, you start this game on a boat and it brings back the ideas from Icewind Dale where you create your party yourself and then set off an adventure with them. Great! It brings back some nostalgia and then you can actually have some decent characters because any of the ones that they generate for you are just ASS...honestly...who picks their shitty ass stats? I swear I saw a pre-selected character that had 18 Charisma for a fighter....WHY!? Anyways, so that is a nice feature. The next new thing that they added which was nice is the idea of having every character included in the dialog. So when you talk you can select a different character and based on their skills they can speak different dialog options. A GREAT IDEA. However, in this game its used like absolute shit because the dialog is fucking crap overall.
I'm going to seperate these paragraphs because I don't want the amount of shit that the rest of these features are tainting the previous text with their awfulness. Ok, so one new thing they introduce is some stupid fucking trading system where you can click on cities and get some raw materials, or other random shit like that. Basically you are running abunch of lame ass trade routes. LAME. What the fuck is this? Age of Empires? I don't want to manage some fucking trade...who gives a shit about that. Yeah, thats what I wan't to do in a video game with Dungeons and Dragons is fucking trade. Hopefully the next expansion I can buy and furnish a house too, and then customize my sim and shove the game up my ass. HONESTLY, its such a fucking AWFUL IDEA that it pisses me the fuck off. Just when I think I get another good D&D expansion, I instead get strapped down with a belt and have someones diarrhea unleashed into my open mouth. The rest of this game is marred by having shitty areas to explore, nothing to do in them, and pretty much general boringness overall. It's seriously stupid. There are some new enemies to fight which is allright, and there is some decent battles but none of them are worth playing the game for and don't make up for the overall crappiness.
Once again, I must seperate the paragraphs because this absolute shitty-dick tainted feature musn't be near anything even remotely decent for it will drag it down into the abyss with it. THE OVERLAND MAP IS THE BIGGEST FUCKING HUNK OF SHIT IN GAMING HISTORY! Gone are the days of simply looking at a beautifully drawn map and selecting your location. Instead, they decdided to make a 3d Living map that you literally have to walk across to get to other locations. The worst fucking part is there is a shit ton of random encounters. YEAH THATS WHAT I WANT IN A WESTERN RPG (D&D) is fucking shitty as japanese RPG elements. Seriously, every two fucking steps you take a million enemies pop on the screen and you always have to fucking fight them. Then you load forever to get to a tiny ass map to fight some stupid bullshit you don't give a fucking shit about. This happens a billion times. Oh yeah remember how all the environments are tiny as crap? Thats right to get a location to advance the story you have to travel across a million shitty fucking random encounters ( FUCK JRPGS THEY ALL SUCK) just to get to some tiny local, then fight a million more encounters to get back. It is seriously the worst fucking system in existence and makes me shit my pants with anger. FUCK YOU OBSIDIAN YOU ARE RETARDED.
Story: Unlike the original campaign which had a decent story, and Mask of the Betrayer which was even better, this game force-feeds you a turd sandwhich down your throat. It is some awful story about trading, your boat gets wrecked, volo is around...whatever its incoherent crap and its just puke.
This game introduced some cool ideas and brought back some old-school elements from IWD and then decided to shove the rest of it up their ass and give us a pile of puke in a box 5/10
