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...continued
And
I Will Call Him George
The
Conjurer, who can charm and summon monsters,
recalls what it's like to have a faithful sidekick.
You'll grow attached to the grizzly bear that
lumbers alongside you, the ogre that shrieks and
howls as it chases frogs through the swamp, or the
flock of imps fluttering around you. You'll tend
their wounds and maybe send them to scout ahead
when you're weak. When confronted by swarms of
monsters, the Warrior hacks into them like so much
underbrush, and the Wizard waves his hand and
dispatches them with a fireball, but the Conjurer
charms a few of them and sits back on the sidelines
to enjoy the battle royal.
Mana
From Earth
The
world of Nox offers readily renewable sources of
mana through replenishing crystals and stations
that are scattered around the levels. This gives
you much more spellcasting freedom than in Diablo,
in which mana potions were limited--playing a
Sorcerer in Diablo often felt as if you were trying
to drive a gas-guzzler from gas station to gas
station across a desert highway. Remember finding a
new spell, saving the game, trying out the spell,
then reloading so you didn't waste precious mana
while learning how the magic worked? You don't need
to do any of that in Nox: there's mana, mana,
everywhere!
Surprisingly,
Nox's interface is, dare I say, better than
Diablo's. Nox is played with hot keys that relate
to the positions of the icons on the game screen.
It's a simple matter to swing a sword, pop off a
few different spells, quaff a mana potion, or
switch to a bow and unleash a stream of arrows.
Unlike Diablo's huge sliding panels, Nox lets you
bring up as much information as you want or need,
and still see the game world well enough to
play.
LAN,
Party of Two
Unfortunately,
Nox doesn't live up to Diablo when it comes to
multiplayer gaming. The first strike against it is
that a CD is required for every computer running
the game. Two CDs come in the box, so if you have a
LAN, all you can play are dull one-on-one
duels--unless, of course, you buy extra copies of
the game. Also, Nox is incompatible with LANs that
are hooked up to the Internet. If a computer has
two network cards or an active dial-up connection,
it can't run multiplayer Nox.
Worst
of all, Nox has no cooperative gameplay. RPGs were
founded on the idea that you and your buddies could
team up, not just fight each other (that's for war
gamers). But Nox allows only deathmatch-style
multiplayer gaming, which feels lopsided. The
monsters that Conjurers can summon don't last long,
and Warriors rely too much on picking up equipment
to be competitive. So the most common style of
gameplay seems to be a bunch of Wizards running
around flinging powerful one-shot-kill spells at
each other. In team games, however, great
opportunities for cooperation among the classes
exist: Warriors are front-line shock-assault
troops; Wizards are longer-range artillery types
who defend the base with spell traps; and Conjurers
call up monster patrols. Maybe once new players
settle down with the Wizards, these kinds of
cooperative games will be more common on Westwood
Online's servers. In the meantime, the
single-player Nox has enough interesting twists and
benefits over Diablo to be considered a worthwhile
game in its own right.
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