I was surprised by that because developer Cryptic gets so much about the gamepad right. Using these abilities with the Xbox One controller's rumble would make them even more exciting, which is why it's so bizarre to find it missing in action. I'll let my Daily powers build up, and bam, I shoot down to the Forgotten Realms with a slam that sends enemies reeling. I might hit the Y button to activate Restoring Strike, and boom, up goes my greatsword knocking back a dead enemy like Babe Ruth hitting a homer. I like to smash things, and it obliges with simple controls that make use the seven classes’ diverse abilities.Īs a person who usually plays warriors in MMORPGs, I tend to judge them on how satisfying they make it to beat things down with a big hammer or blade, and regardless of Neverwinter's other issues, few MMOs beat it in this regard. The focus here is on combat in the style of God of War or Darksiders, and Neverwinter usually keeps me so focused on it that I rarely find cause to miss more open surroundings. You eventually get that here at the level cap, but only in the form of slightly less linear instances.īut on the Xbox One, I find that's not so much a problem. Sometimes the path widens considerably, yes, but it's an experience that's not terribly unlike the opening 100 hours of Final Fantasy XIII, where the action unfolds across unrelenting, ill-disguised corridors before at last opening up to wider vistas. The problem is that most of Neverwinter's heavily instanced zones are as linear as that haft, and many consist of little more than long paths as you bounce forward from quest to quest. Neverwinter isn't without its moments of beauty, and only a few hours in, I found myself looking forward to the moment when I could again ride up the haft of Lakkar's Axe, a skyscraper-sized greataxe that forms a bridge across a chasm on Mount Hotenow as though Marvel's Galactus had dropped it while trying to chop down Yggdrasil.

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