Nox™

I bought this one about year after release. Very nice game with good graphics and interesting gameplay. There are some options you won't find in TL or Magicka f.e. you have to repair your gear. I would say Nox was the only real competition to Diablo/Diablo2/Dungeon Siege, but it was not too advertised (at least i couldn't see it then). Well all I can say is go get it and see what you have missed ;-)

At first, I enjoyed this game greatly. I hadn't play this game earlier, so there wasn't any nostalgia at play that could cloud my judgement. The plot is somewhat linear and straightforward, but engaging, an the gameplay is really addictive. For a time, at least. What irritated me to the point I actually stopped playing? - inventory; it's a mess, believe me. In most RPGs you have your backpack + your body, so whatever you put on, it dissapears form the backpack. Not in Nox. You click on the item you want to use (shield, boots etc) and it highlights, but it stays in the backpack? By the time you have a lot of items in your inventory finding the ones you are using and the ones for sale or use at a later time is not so easy anymore. - Durability. A lot of RPGs has that item characteristic, but in none I've played before I actually got an item destroyed during a quest, before I could get to a shop to repair it! So you have 3 choices: 1) when an item is almost broken you stop wearing it and continue to play without it (making you weaker, with lesser armor); 2) you play having 2 or 3 items of each kind but then you have little place for items you find on a quest and the profit from the loot is really small; 3) you don't care and let the items be destroyed which for me is not an option at all! I stopped playing Nox altogether and got back to Diablo II, to reasonable inventory and items that are not so breakable that they can be destroyed in the span of one quest...

Never played this before, but Nox holds up well if you like Diablo-style hack'n'slash games. Though really, it's only superficially like Diablo. For one, dungeons in the campaigns aren't randomly generated, and there's a lot higher emphasis on secrets and traps. Leveling is even more straight forward, so don't expect much in the way of build variety. That being said, each of the three classes plays very differently from one another, with their owns strengths and weaknesses. I suggest beginners play as a warrior or conjurer to get a feel for the game, as the mage is a bit trickier to master. Regardless, the game is fun and easy enough to pick up and play without reading the manual. Regarding stability, as of this review's date it worked straight "out of the box" on my Windows 10 desktop. The only caveat is that there was a constant 'flickering' of the UI elements, and music would sometimes glitch in the menus. To fix this, I had to play the game from 'GAME.EXE' and not GOG's default, which is 'NOX.EXE'. If you're having issues, try making a shortcut from the 'GAME.EXE' and use that instead. This fixed all issues for me.

In some ways, Nox was so ahead of its time that the industry still hasn't caught up. Not only is it a rare (but obvious) thought of genius for an hack-n-slash to use the mouse to direct spells, while the keys control movement; But, Nox has developed it to the point of responsiveness you won't often see outside of first-person shooters. And Nox did it in 2000. There are other things to say, of course. The art is quite lovely, if not astounding. The prevalence of voice acting is a nice touch. The dialogue and story are... Okay, if a bit unskilled in the writing. That's not what Nox is about, though. It's the gameplay. And the gameplay is outright fantastic, 25 years on.

This is one of my favorite games of all time. Somehow, I like it even more than Diablo 2. That is pretty strange since Diablo 2 is randomly generated, but that speaks to how much Nox speaks to me. Don't get me wrong, I love Diablo 2, but somehow I have probably played through Nox hundreds of times compared to maybe under 100 of Diablo. It's kind of a puzzle to me why I actually like Nox that much. But everything from the enemies, the way you control your characters, the fireballs, and electric bolts, are all so god-damn crisp and clean. You can probably eat off your moniter after a p*** session, it's that clean. If I were to ever do a speedrun of a game, this would be it.