Shadows of Undrentide Review at Gamers.com
Posted Saturday, August 16, 2003 - 19:12 CET by Veldrin

The SoU reviews just keep coming. This time, Gamers.com reviews the Neverwinter Nights expansion pack and gives it a final score of 8/10. Here's a clip:

SOU's campaign, which is a wholly separate story from NWN's campaign, appears deceptively short (two chapters and an interlude). But even the interlude is filled with three lengthy dungeons, so you'll find yourself spending anywhere between 25 and 30 total hours on this. And overall, SOU far betters NWN's uneven single-player campaign, in which the few excellent and memorable quests and dungeons (Charwood, the Creator Ruins) were buried among more traditional D&D RPG fare. Here, there's a more Fallout-ish approach to traditional quests in that just about every quest can be solved diplomatically--utilizing intelligence or charisma--in addition to the "apply weapon to target liberally" method. Opportunities include convincing gnolls to switch sides, negotiating with hostage-taking kobolds, and brokering a trade agreement over holy wine. While SOU isn't flexible enough to let you finish it without ever hitting anyone, the quality of the quests and, later on, the dungeons is enough to make the SOU campaign more consistent and interesting than the original NWN campaign. You still can't control Henchman, but at least you can fiddle with their inventory and give them better battle behavior orders (like Fallout 2's improvement upon Fallout). Unfortunately, the Henchman changes aren't retroactive to the original NWN campaign.

See it all here.