TThe Forgotten Realms welcomes you back, but a hero's return or plans for world domination will have to sit on the backburner - for a while at least - because you, the fabled shard-bearer, have awakened in an unknown place as a pale shadow of what you once were. You are weak and your power has left you, gone the way of the shard that was embedded next to your heart; a void now lingers within you, aching to be filled. Neverwinter Nights 2 returns with this expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, allowing you to continue the journey you embarked upon from West Harbor.

You have left behind the Sword Coast and now roam the land of Rashemen, near the kingdom of Thay. Here your past deeds are unheard of, giving you the chance for a fresh start. Although the land may be different and maybe you too have changed, the one constant that remains is that the populace are dependent upon you once again. Whether it is the mysterious Red Wizard Safiya, who is not all she appears, or the brooding Sprit Sharman Gann, whose family ties are not fully known to him, there are new companions to meet who can be influenced, one way or another.

Graphically, MotB sets the scene well and while not at the exceedingly high level set by some leading titles, such as Final Fantasy XII, it still makes for good viewing. As with the original, there is no impressive FMV on offer here; all the cut scenes are scripted sequences that use the in-game models, rather than higher polygon models that some games create solely to make their cut scenes a little flashier. For players who are unhappy with the way they developed their avatar, or those who just want a fresh start, the character creation options are still available at the start of a new game. In addition to the races and classes from the original, several new options have been added, with races like Half-Drow and Fire Genasi and classes such as Sprit Sharman and Red Wizard, so you have some new appearances and skill sets to choose from.

The music for MotB follows the same path as the original, with good use of chimes for magical situations, the hit of high impact music in battle to raise the heart rate and the added ambiance for a boss fight taking it one step further. A sign that a game has used music well is when you find yourself humming tunes from it for no apparent reason. It's not often you will find an RPG where you will rave about the high quality of music used, but you will remember it if it is awful! *cough* Final Fantasy X-2 *cough*. The sound effects aren't anything special; they do the job just but there are often got so many sounds hitting at once that your ears may struggle to keep up with it all - for example, you can potentially have four magic casters in your party, so imagine all four of them casting spells in battle at the same time, bang lighting storm, bang earthquake, bang fire blast, bang glacial winds; all those different sounds working in tandem, along with whatever the enemies are throwing at you, can get a little cluttered. Then there's the incredibly annoying dinging sound of magical buff spells being cast or expiring; honestly, it's like being in a doorbell warehouse at times! Despite these issues, the sound quality is good enough, but it is an area that could have been better.

Mask of the Betrayer, like its predecessor, is played using Dungeons & Dragons rules. This means that your attacks and spells are calculated by the adding of two numbers, like the combined score of two dice. You also have rules from D&D applied, such as fire and acid being needed to kill Trolls, for example. The land you now inhabit is what you would expect from D&D; Rashemen provides a medieval setting, with stone houses, old crypts, temples, forestry landscapes, caves - you get the picture, populated by axe-wielding warriors and powerful wizards.

The game is smaller in scale than the original, both in terms of the time needed to complete it and the fact that you will only get a limited number of companions. The maximum number you can have in your party is four, including your avatar, so at times you will have to leave one of your allies behind. This can lead to problems, as you don't have the depth of classes to pick from to form your party as you did in NWN2. This can especially be a problem if your avatar happens to be a magic caster, as the first three companions you will meet are not warriors, but magic casters themselves. Anyone familiar with the original game or general RPGs will understand the use of a 'tank' character, someone to take the damage from the hordes of enemies that attack to leave the spell casters free to level them with some hard hitting magic. So you can see how you could be left struggling earlier on if your avatar is not a tank.

There are three game modes available for you to choose from - Single Player, LAN or Online. In Single Player mode you have the campaign of the Mask of the Betrayer to play through, which follows the standard practice of RPGs; you engage in dialog with many different NPCs and gain a few new companions throughout your adventure, you fight enemies, you level up with experience points gained from battle or from completing quests and you collect gold by the bucketload, although the range of goods you can buy is fairly limited. This is because the emphasis for MotB has switched more towards the crafting side of things. In the original you could buy, find, and win (via battles and quests) craft equipment, items, accessories and weapons. Now you can use some of the many - and I mean many - spirit essences you collect from vanquished enemies to craft new armour, accessories, items and weapons. Your past deeds and acquired skills should also allow you to claim a prestige class at some point, adding between five to ten levels to this new class for some extra abilities and statistics. The aim of this mode remains the same as the original NWN2; complete the story to complete the game. How you choose to do that is up to you though, and now that you are carrying a new power within you, you have the chance to be truly good and noble, or really ruthless and evil.

A good example of how your actions can affect the story and your relationships with your companions can be found in the original game. If you did not please your companions - maybe you constantly disagreed with them, stopped them doing what they wanted to do, or did things that upset them - they would simply leave your party. Your actions - and consequently your status of being good or evil - would give you the choice of either joining the King of Shadows, leading his armies to take over the Sword Coast, and killing your companions, or you would stand up against him in a fight to the death, for justice and honour. You could also become involved in a romantic storyline with either Casavir (a female character) or Elanee (a male character). Mask of the Betrayer offers these same options; you can gain influence with your companions in a more detailed way than the original, and this can bring benefits like improvements to stats and new abilities. Or you can say things to upset them, take courses of action that they disagree with and eventually get them to turn on you. You have the romance options open to you again, and in the end you will also get the chance to show your true colours, whether they be the white of good or the black of evil.

The LAN and Online modes follow the same pattern as each other and the same game styles are available on both. Unlike Single Player, you can play on these two modes with other human players, with Online usually offering more available player slots than LAN, unless you happen to have a big local area network. There is a good variety of things to do in both of these modes, from following the storyline with the PW Story and Story light modes to a good, old-fashioned free-for-all brawl in Melee, to the Team mode, where you can join your buddies to take on other teams in a battle for bragging rights. These are just a few of the available styles, but this should paint a picture of what is there for you. One important thing to add here though is that you will need to create a character to be your avatar online; the general idea is to export one of you characters from either the original NWN2 or MotB, as some of the higher level abilities and stats will come in handy in the PvP (player vs. player) arenas. However, in case you are solely interested in playing in multiplayer, you can just create a new character at the start of MotB, give him/her the stats and abilities you want, save at the beginning of the game, then just use the escape key and export the character, ready to be used.

The gameplay has its ups and its downs. The free camera option allows you to view the action from whatever angle you want, so you can go from slanted, to top down, to horizontal and in-between, which helps when you are trying to target one enemy in a crowd of many. You have the option to set default decisions for your party members, so the ones you are not presently controlling will act in a certain way, which can prove useful, as the battles take place in a real-time setting. You don't get a lot of time to think in the heat of battle, so the fewer characters you are controlling, the better. This doesn't mean that you can't switch to controlling one of the other characters though; your avatar can utilise the same settings, so if you feel like a change, let him or her go into puppet mode and you can control somebody else for a bit; variety is never a bad thing.

One issue that has carried over is the sensitivity of camera movement. You can change the camera angle with the mouse or keyboard, but after years of practice, the habit of moving the avatar with the keyboard and the view with mouse is hard to shake, and the sensitivity just goes from one extreme to the other. You have three zoom settings to work with - close-up, medium and wide view - which can be adjusted using the up and down arrow keys or the mouse wheel. When close-up, the turning circle of the camera is not dissimilar to an Abrahams tank, slow and cumbersome. Medium view is a bit better but still on the slow side, while in wide view all you need to do is sneeze on the mouse and the screen will go into a spin that a washing machine would be proud of! Is this better than the original NWN2? Yes, but not enough.

This and the aforementioned sound issues are quite annoying, but they shouldn't put you off Mask of the Betrayer, because if you are a big RPG fan and you loved the original then you will definitely enjoy this. There is a good variety of quests and missions to complete, and an in-depth new twist to the story that gives you some fantastic options to further develop your reputation. Often you are given the choice to do the right, good thing or the wrong, evil thing, just like in the original. Your actions also determine how other scenarios play out, and how potential allies become enemies and vice versa. Some examples of the missions and quests you can go on vary from creating an anointing solution to curing a diseased forest or creating a more foul substance to quicken its demise. These quests involve you getting hold of the items you need, some through battle and others through talking to the right people, and these are great examples of what this game, and good RPGs in general, are all about.

A big improvement upon Neverwinter Nights 2 is that you can now see your built up relation points with your other party members. In the original you could not see this, which led to a few surprises as to whose side your companions would choose to be on for the final battles. Having loyal or devoted party members is certainly an asset, and you gain some nice bonuses for achieving this, like stat boosts for them and you. And without giving away the nature of the new power that lies inside you, let's just say that you will have a new factor to consider throughout the game. A new hunger burns inside you that will need to be sated, one way or another, and if you ignore this then you will perish. Mastering this new blessing or curse, whichever way you look at it, will gain you some quite incredible powers. You can have the lives of so many in your hands; a couple of mouse clicks can really mean life or death.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer brings further twists as you continue on your adventure. A new land awaits you, with new companions, classes, races, friends, enemies and so much more. You have awakened and you are ready to start again; the new presence that has replaced the shard is beginning to stir. You know in the pit of your soul that this is a power the likes of which you have never felt before. In time, you will find out what you have become - and, more importantly, what you will become...

Reviewed by Adam March for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).