Neverwinter review

Characters

On the plus side, the number of character customization options you have is pretty impressive. With most MMOs you don’t have a lot of options other than race, gender and some basic facial features or hairstyle changes.

Neverwinter actually lets you customize things like your character’s hip width on a sliding scale selector, giving you levels of control over your character that few online games offer. You can even age your character’s face, change features to natural or unnatural colors, and add facial tattoos and scars.

Yet for all options when it comes to physical traits, the real Dungeons and Dragons the feature options are surprisingly few. Your class selections are very limited and most of them focus on creating a hack and slash character.

Fight

This may be due to the fact that the combat mechanics of the game are also quite limited. You can only fight creatures using a couple of mouse clicks and a small handful of hotkeys.

Another complaint about the combat system is the lack of an automatic basic attack function. In most games, once you initiate an attack against a creature, the game will continue to automatically attack that creature with whatever base method you have equipped. Hit him with a stick, hit him with a sword, throw magic darts at him, and so on. You can keep selecting special attacks in the middle of this, but the basic attack continues.

Neverwinter has no such feature. You have to manually click for each attack, making the fighting process not only tedious but unnecessarily challenging. It’s harder to figure out which custom attack you’d like to throw at someone if you can’t get the mouse away from the target long enough to flip through your options.

Final verdict

If you are interested in an MMO to connect with guilds and play a story, Neverwinter is worth a try. For all his failures when it comes to graphics and game mechanics, he is one of the best around when it comes to a truly developed story and your ability to build your story as a player character. But if it wasn’t a free game, I wouldn’t recommend paying for it.