Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of Underdark

Bioware's latest add-on...

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You can also now craft items in the game. Nestled amongst the 50 new feats are weapon craft and armour craft. As you go through the game all sorts of base materials can be found; from shards of wood dropped by busted chests to bars of iron from demolished doors right through to bars of adamantine. With a high enough craft skill these can be turned into a wide range of weapons and armour. Unfortunately the amount of effort in locating the base materials, in combination with the high GP cost of making an item and the total lack of XP to be gained from a successful crafting, makes this new addition most underwhelming. Saying that, you can cast things like poison onto your weapons for extra damage, and weapons and armour can have both their appearance and their characteristics improved. This gives HotU a lot of scope for personalisation; it's just a shame that the rewards are mostly aesthetic.

Visually, HotU brings a lot more to the basic NWN pot. There are four new tilesets for those interested in building their own modules, along with a host of new features to implement and tools to help you on your way. But for those like me just interested in the gaming we can marvel at the beauty and range of the particle effects that are so wondrously abundant in this expansion. Some of them are truly magnificent, and you can tell that the artists and programmers had a lot of fun utilising the increased power of today's machines in conjunction with their increased familiarity with the game code. The particle effects aren't confined to the 40 new spells and their prevalence really helps to bring a rich level of vibrancy to the NWN world.

I suffered no real slow down even in the larger battles, and when you consider that they can involve dozens of creatures and some very high level spells that's a most impressive thing. The camera has been tweaked for this release as well. You can now manipulate it in any way you choose except for making it first person. It's very handy being able to zoom as far out as you now can, especially when traversing long distances, although I still wish that you could click on the mini-map and your party would find their way there. You can also get right into the action now with a pseudo third person view. These tweaks add just a little more scope to the game's visuals and are a welcome enhancement, especially in the cutscenes, which benefit from the increased fluidity and dynamicism.

In light of all the work that has gone into improving the gameplay and the graphics it's a shame that every time you get into a fight you will be subjected to the same bloody music that you would have heard in the very first fight at the academy in the city of Neverwinter. There are some new incidental and ambient tracks, and lovely they are too, but why couldn't we get some new fight music? If you choose to bring the reptilian bard Deekin along you can expect to smirk at his musical 'prowess' and as we have come to expect from the series the voice acting is top notch. This particular instalment is fairly well paced in its shifts from dialogue heavy sections to all out action slug-fests. I thought the story slumped a little bit about 3-5 hours into the game, however it really picks-up later on as you find yourself venturing into all kinds of weird and wonderful places. I really enjoyed the plot and felt that it wrapped up all the stories from the previous two instalments quite neatly. Saying that, the predictable nature of each of the three chapter's beginnings is boring now - can the designers not think of somewhere else other than a town/village/enclave to start off the next section of the story? The tail end of the game also suffers badly from a lack of decent merchants. You will pick up a dijini bottle fairly early on which allows you to summon a shopkeeper three times a day, but his selection gets limited and his prices are poor. There's so much loot later on in the game that it's a shame you can't capitalise on its value, but at least the variety of objects is massive and I doubt that any class of player will be disappointed with the goodies available to their chosen profession(s).