Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

Classic cRPGs like BG or Fallout or NWN ultimately come out of the pen-and-paper DnD craze of the late 1970s and 1980s; but they overcame a PnP basement-dwelling ethos right out of the box.

And while NWN1 and NWN2 (less so) escaped the darkness of that dungeon, MOTB is a return to those origins and then some. It's a sort of oddball trip to the Land Before cRPG Gaming Time.

It is downright wonky, through and through.

The tech is outdated, the writing and dialogue is simply unbearable, and the touted 'spirit eater' mechanic, central to MOTB, is a game-breaking nuisance.

MOTB feels like a polished, but not particularly inspired (or at least falsely inspired), user-made mod.

But MOTB has two things going for it.

One is the core class and gameplay mechanics that the DnD ruleset brings to it; the DnD system is rich and incredibly complex and intellectually satisfying.

The second is the single spark of creativity from Obsidian, to be found in party make-up: your in-game friends can include some (literally) colorful characters. Nothing they have to say is particularly interesting (they too can be rather annoying in terms of how they are written, as well as how they are coded to behave); but it is a rare and admirable thing that your group is not limited to NPCs you could have whipped up yourself on the creation screen.

And that's all that really needs to be said about MOTB, a game that is scored way too high by critics simply for its pseudo-Biowarian pedigree, although one could go on about the horrible inefficiency of of the engine, the smashed-keyboard-inducing camera, the generally bad world construction and poor design choices.

Did I mention the positively insufferable dialogue?

Or the insipid story?

Let's hope Zehir is better.