In many ways, Neverwinter Nights 2 is the game fans expected to see out of the original. It's almost as if developer Obsidian Entertainment listened to customer feedback and combined the Baldur's Gate model with that of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and tossed in a dash of Neverwinter Nights to create the sequel. It's like playing Baldur's Gate II using the D&D 3.5 rules but with a 3D camera that allows you to spin the view and zoom in when you want a good look at a bad guy's face. In the end, performance and AI issues drag the experience down a bit, but this is a far superior game.

It was a smart move to take the design of the sequel and back up a bit. This is an old-fashioned party based adventure, which is really what most RPG fans, and particularly what D&D fans, want to play. The original Neverwinter Nights was a focused on your lone hero. You would get an occasional brain dead henchman to follow you around but you were more or less on your own. The new game allows you to take several NPCs along for the ride from a fisticuff-loving Dwarf fighter, a Tiefling rogue, a Gnome bard (seriously) and even a farm-gal turned warrior. There's a good mix of NPCs that you meet on your adventure and best of all is that you have complete control over them in how they fight and which skills and feats they acquire as they gain levels.

The biggest issue with your party members is that they're not particularly bright. From frustrating pathfinding issues to their liberal use of spells and potions, unless you take complete control you're going to get annoyed – fast. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing your party members suck down valuable potions while fighting a bunch of rag tag orcs. Thankfully, you can alter their behavior patterns or even better turn off the companion AI completely and take control of everything yourself.

The solo campaign is a huge step up from that of the original. It's very long – it'll take a lot of hours to get through it all and replay value is very high due to your character options. The story isn't bad, but it is a bit slow at the start. In fact you'll spend a lot of time fighting generic thugs once you reach Neverwinter itself and thugs, even of the spell casting variety, get a bit old after a while. Things do pick up considerably, though, particularly near the end of Act I.

As far as storytelling goes, it's not in the same league as Planescape: Torment, or the Baldur's Gate series for that matter, but is head and shoulders above Neverwinter Nights and the Icewind Dale saga. There's no reason to supply storyline spoilers, but there are parts of the campaign that feel like it's just a direct path to your main goal. There are very few side quests. They're there, but they are few and far between. In Neverwinter Nights 2, you have a goal to reach, and you'll spend almost all of your time trying to reach it. People with a cat stuck in a tree are just going to have to wait.

So you have a role-playing game with a good enough storyline, a lengthy campaign, solid NPC interaction and accompanying voice work, the D&D 3.5 rule set, lots of nifty magic items and even an item/alchemy workbench to make your own goodies ala Knights of the Old Republic.

What's not to like?

Unfortunately, Neverwinter Nights 2 plays at times like a game that had to meet a deadline and was ushered out the door a few weeks before it was ready. Going back to your party members for a moment: at times, even with all of the AI turned on, they'll simply stop following you. It's aggravating to run down the road only to notice that your entire clan is back a few hundred yards with a drool cup under their mouths. Usually after going to a new area the AI resets and everything is fine, but stuff like this adds up after a while. In addition, there are times when the game literally breaks, and doesn't allow you to enter a new area or continue a vital plot conversation. You are absolutely stuck. Thankfully, a workaround was found by members of the community to fix these issues – if you get stuck inside this loop make sure you have your main character selected before starting a conversation or entering a new area. Without doing that, the game can simply break.