Here's all you really need to know: in one mission you have to save a captured friend to an endless loop of Holding Out for a Hero. You will not fail that mission. Bonnie Tyler will not let you. That's not enough? How about fighting gangs of luchadors and cyberpunk ninjas? Doing a job for Mayor Burt Friggin' Reynolds? Meeting a cast of interesting, quirky characters who don't blink an eye at taking orders from a huge crossdressing monster in clown makeup or a fairytale princess? How about a game that remembers that games are, first and foremost, supposed to be fun? If none of that interests you, then I don't know what to tell you.
As much as I loved the ancient city series (Caesar, Pharaoh, etc.), I was always annoyed by the awkward walker mechanics, influence radii, and general gamey abstractions. CotN did away with those and gave us real citizens who go about their lives in a fairly realistic manner. Watch potmaker Bobhotep take a break from collecting clay to go pray at the temple of Hator, or go see a priest for a cure, or even scavenge for food if business is slow. These changes are probably why some fans of the old games don't like this one as much, but to me they made it so much deeper. Give it a try, take it slow, and watch your city grow from a collection of mud huts to a shining metropolis in the shadow of giant tombs.
Remember when you were 10 and stayed up all night playing your NES one weekend? This is just like the dream you had when you finally fell asleep, thumb spasmodically twitching on the controller.
Weakest, you say? It's an opinion most other people don't share, but I've always found this to be by far the worst of the Infinity Engine games. I decided to give it another try to see if it's improved with age, and mostly it hasn't. The NPCs are less annoying than I used to find them, but that's probably due to the lack of full voice over that's become the norm. Otherwise, most are grating cartoon versions of who they were in BG1 or simply badly written newcomers, with the odd exception. That's fairly easy to ignore, but harder to forgive is the simply awful game design. Enemy AI is ridiculously cheesy, with overpowered force-casting, rule-breaking beasties being the norm. At some point you'll get tired of reloading until you find the magical right way of breaking the system. Overall, it's hard to recommend this. To me it always felt like it was put together by someone who had never played D&D, but simply skimmed the rulebooks, and then slapped an overdose of David Gaider's awful, awful writing into it. If you like Bioware's later games, you'll probably find something here to like. If you don't, then this is the game you can likely trace the things you dislike back to.
