Neverwinter Nights 2 [PC]

Spell effects positively leap off the screen, giving your back-row posse all the "shazam" of a medieval David Blaine. No, wait - that should be "a great deal more shazam" than a medieval David Blaine. All the cutscenes are in-engine and look fantastic, thanks to the absolutely first-rate character models. Make sure your PC's in good shape, though, because the system requirements are steep.

Excellently voiced though the game's characters are, they're lacking some of the more advanced AI options we're used to seeing from this type of game. Left to themselves, quite frankly, they're not too bright. Target prioritization is a particular problem: often your characters will run from one end of a fight to the other with no apparent reason in mind, and splurge all their spells on an unthreatening lizardman without a care.

Still, that's easily fixed by just taking control of them all yourself, switching off the teammate AI altogether, and that's something power D&D players will want to do straight away. Keep one hand on the pause key, and the chaos of controlling four characters at once is minimized.

But for all that, it's not actually a very tough game. For one thing, nobody really dies -- they just sort of keel over, and remain grounded until any nearby enemies are killed or retreat. Then they'll be back on their feet and ready to be healed. Only if your whole party is felled do you get to see the big, bad Game Over screen.

Yes, this system is indeed vulnerable to cheesy running-away-and-healing tactics, but then the game's also open to cheesy quicksave-every-step tactics, and it's always up to you whether you take advantage of them or not. It neatly sidesteps the need to mess around with temples or raise dead spells, and that's certainly a good thing.

Get tired of all that fighting, and you might want to check out the game's other conflict resolution options. Sink your skill points into the right areas, and you'll be able to talk your way around some fights with diplomacy, threats or bluffs - Knights of the Old Republic players will know the drill. Bored of that? Try the crafting system, which lets you combine rare ingredients with recipes and spells to create powerful items.

But one of the best things about the game is its sheer replayability. Once the humungous campaign finally rolls up, too, we challenge you not to jump straight back in, choosing a totally different class; maybe a mace-wielding half-demon Tiefling berserker. Or a bard. Or a warlock. Or one of the umpteen high-powered Prestige classes. Oh, and this time you just have to choose all the evil dialog options, kill as many innocents as possible, and generally be the bad guy, assuming you didn't do that on your first play through, of course. This, like all the best computer RPGs, is not the kind of game you only play through once.

Or, necessarily, on your own. Fans of the genre will not be shocked to hear that you can play through the entire campaign with up to three friends. Sure, a pick-up-and-play online buddy isn't going to stick with you for the weeks it'll take, but if you have a regular group of gaming buddies it'll be just the ticket. But you're sure to get bored of the same campaign eventually, even with all that variety, right?

Wrong. Well, perhaps not, but the point is that it doesn't matter. The game ships with a built-in, easy to use toolkit with awesomely powerful functionality -- in short, it's everything you need to create your own adventures, using the same engine and gameplay system as the regular campaign. They can be just as complex as the supplied story, or more so if you have the talent. Single-player or multiplayer adventures are both possible, and so are player-versus-player arenas. In short, the possibilities are only limited by your ideas.

Neverwinter Nights 1 spawned a colossal number of superb add-ons, community-developed and official, that expanded its lifespan many, many times beyond the content that came in the retail box. There's no reason to think this one will be worse off - quite the opposite, if anything. The only thing that's missing is a "dungeon master" interface for players to control and manage the play experience of others, but that's coming.

If the focus of the first Neverwinter Nights left you cold, or if the recent dearth of classic-style role-playing games is getting you down, NWN2 is the cure. It's no Baldur's Gate II, nor is it a Planescape: Torment, but the way things are going it's the closest we're likely to get this century. As to what the vast Neverwinter Nights community will find to do with the toolkit, and how the multiplayer takes off, time will tell, but even if your interest is just in vanilla RPG epics you'll be well served by NWN2. In other words, just buy it already.