Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer Review

Sorcerer’s Place has reviewed Mask of the Betrayer, and are impressed by the expansion’s story but annoyed at other elements.

Then, finally, the game was released. I impatiently queued for my pre-ordered copy, waiting to throw it into my DVD drive as soon as I got home, and once it was in my hands, I was almost tripping over my feet to get it home. A quick installation process, and I was away! Deciding to begin with I would play through the game with my original character from NWN2 to save time, I played away for a good half an hour. Then, for some inexplicable reason, my party turned on each other, slaughtered themselves to a man, and the game crashed. I was forced to smile and shake my head as I thought to myself “what more did I expect?”

Luckily, Obsidian were on the ball (no sarcasm intended, honestly) and instructions were released on how to install the game to avoid serious issues, and a hotfix, that good old word we’ve come to rely on in the days of what I call “paying customer beta testing”. Once more, I whacked in the DVD and took a week off work. I wasn’t going to miss this.
(…)
Despite the definite playability of the original campaign in Neverwinter Nights 2, no-one could truly accuse the game designers of exhausting the barrel of original ideas. I mean, the bad guy at the end was a truly excellent depiction of evil and eventual Armageddon, but the entire lead-up to your encounter with him is something of a (same-old) dungeon crawl. So imagine my delight when I found out that the story of the expansion is decidedly better in almost every way. The game’s ending was completely unexpected, right up until the designated moment where the game designers wanted you to go (aah!). In a lot of games, you tend to find that a good half of the quests have little, if anything to do with the main quest, and most of your time is spent wondering why on earth your PC would be doing such a thing during a time of obvious need for haste. While I occasionally found myself mildly confused trying to follow several different threads of the story at once, they all came together brilliantly at the end.

Overall, despite its drawbacks, this game reminds me of the Simpsons. All the parts are imperfect and dysfunctional, yet somehow, they mesh together surprisingly well. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this expansion, and I must say the story was wonderfully thought out. Not many games reach for “epic” and achieve it quite so well, though it has to be said the game is not as difficult as many would hope for. With high level and epic level spells in abundance making the combat just a little bit difficult to follow at times, you can however, rest assured that your companions will pummel anything that moves with meteor swarms and vampiric feasts as long as they have any control over their own actions. If you’re looking for a challenge, you can always replay the original campaign with a new race though, eh?