NWN2 - Reviews @ GamingTrend, PALGN, Plain Games

A trio of NWN2 reviews made it to the 'net just before Christmas - let's start with GamingTrend who awarded 85% but kick off with this dodgy opening:

Neverwinter Nights was created by some of the biggest names in the industry – Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, Trent Oster, and Feargus Urquhart, all of Bioware fame at the time. Almost 10 years later, we see the release of Neverwinter Nights 2, but this time it is handled by Obsidian – a company formed by Feargus Urquhart. So while it seems that Neverwinter Nights has been handed to another company for development, it is actually right at home with Obsidian.

PALGN is less impressed.  Describing it as "an absolute mess" and suggesting the game has a limited lifespan because "where else do you go from there since the game is linear and provides very little in terms of side-quests", the score is still 6.5/10:

Oh boy - what have you done this time Obsidian? Are your games just a reflection of a poor development studio or are you really stuck with bad luck; what with your constantly rushed games? Knights of the Old Republic 2 felt like a stake to our Star Wars-loving hearts with its unfinished ending – and now we have Neverwinter Nights 2 which is fitted with incredibly poor gameplay decisions and is released in what can only be described as a ‘untested’ state.

...and finally, Christian gaming site Plain Games awarded 4/5:

An interesting element to any role-playing game is character alignment (a character’s basic sense of morality); though, Obsidian takes character interaction a little further with the addition of character background, an element that has not surfaced before in electronic gaming. Characters may be aligned as good, neutral, or evil, with three degrees to each set (lawful, neutral, and chaotic). A character’s alignment impacts how non-player characters (NPCs) interact with your hero. Alignment also impacts what classes you may play as certain classes, like the Monk, require a certain alignment, in this case, lawful. Players are asked, during character creation, to select a background from six different choices, with the additional no background option, which slightly impacts how the people who know your character view him, and also grants special bonuses and penalties to your character’s skills.