Review

As Action RPGs go, Nox is a good one. Just writing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though, since the notion of a 'good action RPG' is a bit of an oxymoron. Nox is the fourth action RPG that I've played (virtually in succession) and likely also the last, barring a major reform of the genre. I'm done with them. There are just too many kinds of games that work for me to spend any more time with such an inherently flawed game recipe. I won't re-state my grievances here, since I ranted verbosely in my Diablo 2 and Darkstone reviews, and because I'm saving the megadose of vitriol for my pending Dungeon Siege review. Suffice to say that action RPGs have the least amount of game in them of any kind of game that I've played.

Let me start off with some nice things to say about Nox. It's very well implemented. The graphics are stylish, especially the rampantly entertaining particle effects. The audio is fun and engaging in all aspects: voice-acting, music, ambient and sound effects. The level design is solid (albeit a little too linear) and rewards the observant and investigative player. The interface is efficient and powerful, suffering from only a handful of oversights. Save/load times are fabulously short. And despite the fact that you can jump, there are no jumping puzzles, thank the lord! I also have to congratulate Westwood on providing, as far as I can tell, a bug-free game! No kidding!

In short, this is a charming little game. It doesn't take itself too seriously and because of that I didn't either, and the experience was more entertaining for it. If it weren't the case that Nox offers up fundamentally unrewarding gameplay, I could really get a crush on it. But I can't because Nox can't charm its way out of its own soul. It is still, at the core, a game in which you click almost mindlessly on an endless stream of equally mindless enemies, collecting items for your paper doll avatar in a carrot-on-a-stick trek up the stat curve.

To be fair, that description is less accurate for Nox than it is for the other action RPGs I've played, but the shoe still fits. Where Nox stretches the seams is in the fact that it retains more of its arcade heritage than do the other action RPGs, and this is its strongest redeeming value. It's likely that this kind of gameplay originated with the original Gauntlet, which let you use one of four different character types (there's your "role-playing") to wade through an obscene number of enemies, all the while increasing your abilities and collecting items in order to wade through more enemies. Nox retains more of that arcade action than any other "action RPG" and dresses it up with downright snazzy magic effects and a cool visibility feature. I can't stress enough that Nox's preservation of the arcade action is what convinced me to give it the 20 hours or so necessary to complete the single player game. I may not ever have gotten sweaty palms, or executed some twitchy combat move, or pondered strategies, or been faced with any moral decisions, but as a player I always had something to do. It may not have been much, but it was something. The game emphasizes executing actions more than choosing actions. If I want to use my berserker charge, I have to be coordinated enough to charge in the right direction at the right time. You know, arcade action.

I need to make a few comments about the interface. The game isn't overly complex, but the complexity that exists is handled very well. This is particularly evident with the conjurer and wizard characters, who have a large set of skills at their disposal (two dozen?), as opposed to the warrior, who has just five skills. In fact, the interface feels the least accommodating when playing as a warrior, not because it doesn't serve the warrior well, but because the warrior doesn't have as much to do as the other characters, and so instead of being impressed with how well the interface handles a multitude of skills, you have a greater opportunity to recognize the inefficiencies in inventory management. One of the easiest ways Westwood could have improved the interface is to have an attributes box pop-up whenever you hover over an item in either your inventory or a shop owner's. Instead, you have to click on the 'identify' icon and then click on anything for which you want the full description. This is a totally unnecessary inefficiency. Also, there's no good way to rearrange items in your inventory. You have to drop and then pick up any item you want moved, and even then all you've accomplished is pushing the item to the end of the inventory. This bothered me quite a bit when I was playing as the warrior because I frequently needed to make use of a weapon that wasn't one of my two active weapons (you can toggle easily between two designated weapons). I was constantly scrolling through the inventory frantically trying to find the weapon, instead of just being allowed to place the weapon into an inventory slot that's always immediately visible. The same goes for the food items. It's often preferable to consume some food items instead of the more valuable health potions, and I could have done just that in the span of a few seconds but for the inability to rearrange item placement.

But I don't mean to harp too strongly on that issue. Overall, the interface does a fine job. If you run into things that are interactive, like chests, levers, doors, etc, they just do what they're supposed to do. If your health isn't 100% and you pick up food items, you automatically consume them (though you don't automatically consume them if they're in your possession and then you get hurt). When your health gets low, a loud urgent heartbeat begins to drum, which means that you can keep your eyes on the game and not on the health meter in the corner of the screen. I am, however, tempted to argue that items should be automatically picked up if you walk over them. I never once saw a bag of gold on the floor that I didn't manually pick up, so why should I have to manually pick it up? Ditto for food items, potions, keys, etc.. I haven't thought this through, however, so there may be a good argument against it. For instance, if you've just pruned yourself of excess weight by dropping a slew of items on the ground, you probably don't want to have them frustratingly pop right back into your pack as you walk past them. Still, I think with a little bit of redesign, Nox would have worked wonderfully with a good gamepad instead of the keyboard/mouse. Food for thought, anyway.

The last topic I want to address is multiplayer. Basically, I didn't try it. Sadly, the one thing that Nox just flat out abandoned from its action RPG predecessors was cooperative gameplay. After release, and a good chiding from the reviewers, Westwood provided a multiplayer add-on that enabled cooperative play, but only for "quest" maps, and not for the story-driven campaign. In short, you could run around as a party in areas that had lots of monsters, but there's really no objective to it. No thanks. Nox does have a really great set of multiplayer modes, but here again there's a vital missing ingredient: AI opponents. Multiplayer has the potential to transcend the fatal genre-induced flaws of the single player game. The plethora of different skills for each of the character classes would provide some really intriguing tactical matchups, but without the ability to fill out a game with AI, I'll never know. I could probably talk a friend or two into buying Nox (especially now that it's bargain), but two people don't make a good multiplayer game. Even if I was writing this review the week that Nox was released, I'd be coming down on this issue. I don't like to play on public servers. Random people are whining, cheating assholes. I play with people I know, and I don't know enough people to make up a whole multiplayer match. So Westwood gets a slap from me for dropping the ball, and Nox gets uninstalled.

Was Nox fun? It passes the desert island test. If I was stuck on a desert island (with a PC and electricity) and Nox fell from the sky, would I play it? Sure... but I'd continue to look skyward.

Tips

• Press F12 to take a screenshot (archive them periodically, since the game will start overwriting them).

• Repair your favorite weapon every chance you get, and don't worry about buying much - you'll find most of the good stuff.

• Nox uses UDP ports 18590-18599, so open/forward those if you're behind a firewall or using NAT.

• Most secret areas can be spotted by diligently observing the mini-map. You'll see fragments of the wall outlines where the secrets are accessible.