I love the NWN series! but this expansion has a huge let down. As part of the story you become a spirit-eater and have to feed on spirits constantly to avoid negative effects and eventually death. The main problem with this is that in MOTB resting and travelling take certain amounts of time. Say resting may take 8 hours and when you wake your spirit meter is either dangerously low or you are simply dead. Problem? going a spell caster class is nearly impossible! I played as a spell caster for about halfway through the game and had to quit and start as a melee character because i couldnt rest to replenish my spells. Melee is just boring but this game kinda forces your hand and limits your possiblilities.

The story was actually really good but the gameplay was so torturous and i had to force myself to play it just so i could finish the game. Its taken me a little over a year to finish the game but there was roughly 10 hours of gameplay… not so good.

Right, so I purchased Mask Of The Betrayer in the vain hope that the digital abortion that was NWN 2 would somehow gradually be redeemed. While there have been notable improvements, overall it remains a steaming pile of FAIL.

In the plus column we have a far more interesting story, with a generous helping of moral ambiguity and the opportunity to be truly vile if you’re that way inclined. The pretty graphics are now even prettier, but that prettiness comes at a heavy cost. If your machine struggled with NWN 2, that struggle only becomes more obvious with MOTB. NPC’s are interesting and varied, including Okku, the great bear spirit of Rashemen and One-Of-Many, a malevolent undead entity comprised of many composite spirits.

In the minus column, we’ve been lumbered with the ‘Spirit Eater Curse’. Basically, when you start the game, you discover that you’ve been cursed with a kind of spiritual vampirism. A ‘spirit meter’ allows you to see how much spirit energy you possess. Over time your spirit energy is steadily depleted. As it declines you suffer penalities to your abilities, and these penalities grow more severe as your level of spirit energy drops. To replenish your spirit energy you must ‘devour spirits’. If this feeding is neglected, your level of spirit energy can drop to fatal levels.

Seems like a novel idea, right? However, in practice it simply turns the game into one of those horribly annoying ‘beat the clock’ affairs. You spend a lot of time fretting about your falling levels of spirit energy, and it really detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Worse, when you’re in conversation with NPCs, your spirit energy continues to drop necessitating a manual pause whenever you engage an NPC in conversation.

Novel idea – cack-handed execution.

This is very nicely done, i was a little miffed at the story line jumping so far away & ahead of the prior one, especially how i thought the charecters in the end of nwn2 where finally getting fleshed out to a decent extent, and bam your in another completely different area, which is where its charms are and the new sounds that should have been in the original nwn2 have finally made it in, which is good. Game play does not change that much for me as i tend to go for half orc sorc , (flawed charecters are lots of fun to play). However there are lots of options to the point i might actually go work on my level 8 elf, as the fights are more interesting. I think the game would have been more warmly recived if the nwn2 was as polished on realese as this game is. If you liked the first nwn or nwn2 then this is a must have since good indepth rpg's are becoming harder to find these days, however if you hated the original games, this will not make you magicly like them.