Erebus
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2008
- Messages
- 4,774
I'd bought it when it was released, but it was mainly so I could play the NWN modules requiring this extension. The dreadful experience that is NWN 1 OC was still fresh in my memory, so I really didn't expect anything at all from HotU itself and gave up playing it very quickly, when it looked like it was going to be a dungeon crawler.
Since the Codex consensus about NWN 1 is that only a complete moron would find it to be a good game, I was surprised to find mostly positive comments about HotU and decided to give it another chance. I was pleasantly surprised. It's not quite a great game, but it's a good one and I had fun playing it.
The main story wasn't exactly original, although it got a bit better at the end of chapter 2. However, the smaller things show a good deal of inventiveness. Some of the settings were very good, such as the inverted city or the city in Cania. I found many minor quests to be quite entertaining (the mimic was especially fun !).
There were a lot of puzzles, not extraordinarily difficult but neverthelessl entertaining and quite diverse. The fights were much better than you'd expect them to be considering the system's high-level D&D and our party is more than limited. Quite a few fights involved unusual circumstances or settings that made them even more interesting. I was a bit disappointed by the siege, but it wasn't exactly bad either.
The NPCs weren't extremely memorable in general, but they were okay (I thought Mephisto looked pretty cool !). It was interesting to see Aribeth again. Her fall in NWN 1 OC was only slightly more believable than Anakin Skywalker's in "Return of the Sith", but HotU makes her a more developed character (I'm still pretty pissed about the Persuasion check near the end, although I eventually managed to pass it).
It was nice to have an ending that reflects your choices during the game.
Playing the game again probably won't be quite so enjoyable, but maybe I'll do it anyway, since there are some things I've missed. And there's SoU, which I also gave up on pretty quickly... but I haven't heard much good about it, so I'll probably pass.
Since the Codex consensus about NWN 1 is that only a complete moron would find it to be a good game, I was surprised to find mostly positive comments about HotU and decided to give it another chance. I was pleasantly surprised. It's not quite a great game, but it's a good one and I had fun playing it.
The main story wasn't exactly original, although it got a bit better at the end of chapter 2. However, the smaller things show a good deal of inventiveness. Some of the settings were very good, such as the inverted city or the city in Cania. I found many minor quests to be quite entertaining (the mimic was especially fun !).
There were a lot of puzzles, not extraordinarily difficult but neverthelessl entertaining and quite diverse. The fights were much better than you'd expect them to be considering the system's high-level D&D and our party is more than limited. Quite a few fights involved unusual circumstances or settings that made them even more interesting. I was a bit disappointed by the siege, but it wasn't exactly bad either.
The NPCs weren't extremely memorable in general, but they were okay (I thought Mephisto looked pretty cool !). It was interesting to see Aribeth again. Her fall in NWN 1 OC was only slightly more believable than Anakin Skywalker's in "Return of the Sith", but HotU makes her a more developed character (I'm still pretty pissed about the Persuasion check near the end, although I eventually managed to pass it).
It was nice to have an ending that reflects your choices during the game.
Playing the game again probably won't be quite so enjoyable, but maybe I'll do it anyway, since there are some things I've missed. And there's SoU, which I also gave up on pretty quickly... but I haven't heard much good about it, so I'll probably pass.
