Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer Review
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Mask of the Betrayer's campaign is at its best when presenting the player with non-combat options. To that end, the game presents a group of great adventuring companions with their own involved storylines and a ton of dialogue and fun sidequests to work through. While they don't rise to the level of the quirky companions in Planescape: Torment, the Red Wizard, crusading angel, murdered soul, son of a hag with a Casanova complex and rainbow-colored bear with anger-management issues are three or four cuts above the standard fantasy campaign sidekicks. Some of the non-combat quests and set pieces are also standouts. There's a very clever mirror puzzle inside a Thayan wizard's academy, a game of "mastermind" played in a dream with an inveterate gambler and a truly brilliant series of dialogues in which the player looks for a loophole in a contract for a man's soul signed with a devil.
Even here, bugs and poor implementation mar the experience. Character movement and spellcasting AI has been improved but characters still seem to have a hard time figuring out when to cast a healing spell and occasionally forget to follow the party leader. The quests also have some broken event triggers including one nasty one that made one of my party members disappear permanently. There were some dialogue boxes that attributed the text to the wrong characters and even a few of the ever-popular crashes to desktop.
