Can the Facebook gaming space support another turn based role playing game alongside the excellent and ever expanding Dragon Age 2 from EA 2D?
It seems that the developers at Cryptic Studios and their partners at Wizards of the Coast believe that the answer is “Yes” and have launched the beta stage of Heroes of Neverwinter, a turn based role playing game that seems pretty solid at first but might only appeal to those who are always familiar with the franchise or with the Forgotten Lands campaign setting.
Heroes of Neverwinter start with designing a character and the commitment to the
Dungeons & Dragons system is clear from this stage, with players able to choose everything from the race and class of their character to the exact values for their six main traits.
After that, the game offers a small introductory scenario and then the player arrives in Neverwinter, which serves as an adventure hub complete with a merchant, a tavern, a house for the gamer and a number of possible adventures.
Choosing one of them leads to a very traditional dungeon that needs to be explored from front to back, with each room containing a mix of traps and enemies that need to be dealt with to progress.
Fights are built around turns and each character gets to move around as much as he wants before attacking an enemy or using a special ability.
I only got through about six dungeons until now but the one major complaint is that there are too many movement points for the characters, which pretty much makes positioning useless, with the added minor issue that some enemies are much too tough for a party of low level adventurers.
Another potential problem in the long term is that the loot is not fixed and players actually need to use Luck Potions in order to see what they might get from a dead enemy or chest.
Heroes of Neverwinter is free-to-play but the developers have used the usual tricks of only offering limited energy for actions and creating a premium category of items to get at least a minority of players to pay to play.
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