Storm of Zehir tries to be the square peg in Neverwinter Nights 2's round hole, with predictably lackluster results.

* Interface doesn't work well with this style of RPG
* Flat story loaded with mostly dull quests
* The overland map needs some serious tweaking
* Mostly brutal voice acting.

Storm of Zehir feels different from the very beginning. The story is extremely stripped down, especially in comparison with the cataclysmic original Neverwinter Nights 2 showdown against the King of Shadows and the epic first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Here, you play as a pedestrian low-level hero not looking to save the world but to escort a trade mission on a ship heading from the overexposed Sword Coast to the never-before-seen jungles of Samarach. The game takes this concept so far that you can even sell goods between towns and set up trade routes to make a few bucks as actual merchants. The plot won’t necessarily grab you throughout its 20 hours or so of play, and the first few hours seem to have plenty of RPG clichés--you’ll lose all your gear early on in the game, for instance.​

"But it's only an expansion pack," you might say in Zehir's defense. True, it's only a $30 expansion pack and for the price tag it adds a decent amount of content. Still, the concept for the game is too big for an expansion pack. The developers expended so much effort to make sure these new features work that the bread and butter of the series - the epic storylines, the long journeys through dark dungeons, the thrilling quests - were neglected. The new and old features aren't antithetical but there just wasn't enough time to fit both into this expansion pack. Zehir presents an interesting new direction for the series but I wish innovation didn't come at the expense of the features that attracted fans to NWN2 in the first place. Hopefully Obsidian will take their time with Neverwinter Nights 3 and will be able to give enough attention to the new and old strengths of the series.​