Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

After forcing myself to slog through the Neverwinter Nights OC recently I decided to replay both of the NWN expansions again. Obviously I started with Shadows of Undrentide, and I can't say that I liked it anymore than I originally did the second time around.

In Shadows of Undrentide you assume the role of yet another adventurer academy goer. This particular academy is located at Hilltop, a snowy land to the north. Your instructor, a former adventurer, is ambushed by Kobolds, and his precious artifacts are stolen. Since no one else can do anything right you're sent off to recover the artifacts with the help of a half-Orc egomaniac, or dull Dwarf... yay. After the first chapter the campaign improves, but not by much. I can't for the life of my figure out why they decided to call the second chapter "Interlude" instead of chapter 2, the expansion is already short enough without needing to shorten even more by saying the second chapter is irrelevant.

Shadows brings some new prestige classes into the fold, like the villainous Blackguard. There's also some new creature types and tile sets used in the campaign, and available to module builders in the toolset which I suppose is nice. Really though, Rural Winter should have been included in the original game to begin with since it was set in northern lands. Speaking of which, where is Forest Winter?

The new graphics that go with the new creatures and tile sets are great in quality. They blend in seamlessly with the original creatures and tilesets. The new audio is also fairly good, it could have been better, but at least it's less generic than the original NWN musical score.

Shadows of Undrentide is okay. It's a definite improvement over Neverwinter Nights, but compared to Hordes of the Underdark or the NWN 2 OC and MotB, Shadows of Undrentide is not that great.