A darker, epic-level quest...with a few issues.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was a long-awaited sequel to a wonderful franchise, but it brought along a nearly crippling number of bugs in its original release.  A long series of patches managed to make the game playable and, if you have the right system, downright enjoyable.  Mask of the Betrayer represents the first official add-on to the original campaign and allows you to continue your adventures into epic experience levels.  While it manages to avoid being as absurdly buggy as its parent title, MOB still has enough issues to be seriously irritating at times which detracts from its overall impact.

MOB starts with your character waking up in a mysterious underground barrow after being whisked away from the destruction of the King of Shadows.  Your character is now missing the Sword of the Gith as well as the shard that was previously embedded in his/her chest and your companions are nowhere to be found.  With the help of a mysterious red wizard, you escape the barrow and begin a new adventure far away from the Sword Coast and it's familiar environs.  Your task is to discover why you have been abducted and, ultimately rid yourself of a horrifying curse.

The setting is a land infested with spirits posessing a somewhat more primitive culture than the Sword Coast presented in the original title.  Your home base is the city of Muslantir, which posesses shadow portals leading to a dark, dangerous parallel world.  Your adventures will take you to some of the surrounding country, but much of the plot takes place in Muslantir and it's shadowy netherworld.  You have a new set of companions to work with, although your options are now somewhat limited.  In addition to your ever-present red wizard companion, you may also travel with a bear-god, a half-celestial cleric with a strong point-of-view on the afterlife, a handsome spirit shaman, and one old companion from the original title who appears late in the game.

The overall feel of MOB is quite dark.  The humor which was so prevalent in NWN2 is now nearly absent, and there is sense throughout the game that your choices are nearly always frought with unintended consequences.  It is no longer as easy to recognize the good from the evil path, and you get the sinking feeling throughout that a truly happy ending is probably not in the cards.  I found the setting to be a bit too grim, and missed the colorful world of the Sword Coast after a while.  The characters you meet are also a bit too one-dimensionally grim, although there is a bit of much-needed comic relief in the denizens of the Veil Theater. 

The quest moves along at a fairly quick pace for much of the game, and most of the battles are pretty well balanced even with the epic experience levels involved.  It was enjoyable to have a character at such massively high levels, although most of the battles descended into a bewildering mass of fire, ice, lightning, and other deadly spell effects within moments of starting.  This made it difficult to actually see what was happening, and there were times when I missed important targets among all the hooplah.  Only once, at the very end of the game, did I feel that a battle was poorly scripted.  Your final encounter contains a non-intuitive element that makes it far more irritating (and long) than it should be. 

While the battles are generally well designed, the puzzles are not.  The puzzle-solving dynamic becomes dominant within the academy at Thay, and I found the puzzles to be irritating, time-consuming, and counter-intuitive exercises in frustration.  The game managed to move along at a cracking pace unitl this point, when the puzzles brought everything to a screeching halt.  While I admit to not being the most patient puzzle-solver in the world, some of these riddles were simply not constructed in a logical manner. 

The general gameplay is nearly identical to the original title with a few minor tweaks.  The camera interface, for example, was tinkered with after receiving an avalanche of player criticism in NWN2.  Now you only have two basic camera modes to choose from, with a top-down strategy mode being my favorite.  The "over-the-shoulder" character mode, while allowing you to admire the graphics, does not seem well suited to the game at all.  Overall, the camera seems much more stable in this expansion than it was in the original title, but have no fear.  Obsidian still managed to put one irritating flaw in the camera to keep everybody on their toes.  When you enter and exit a building, the camera automatically rests to an "over-the-shoulder" point of view regardless of how you had it set before.  You must then re-oriented the camera to your liking before heading off.  When you enter or exit another building you have to go through the same irritating process again.  I have no idea why the game developers didn't fix this, but I suppose it wouldn't be a NWN2 title without an irritating camera issue to deal with.

The most siginificant new gameplay element in MOB is the spirt-eater curse.  Your character is now afflicted with a gnawing hunger which can only be satisfied by devouring spirits.  If you fail to devour enough spirits, your "spirt meter" rating will drop and eventually weaken you to the point of death.  This spirit-meter will drop continously with the passage of time, and resting for eight hours will find you waking up quite "hungry."  Every time you devour a spirit, typically in combat, you regain some of your spirit energy.  Unfortunately, you also become increasingly addicted to devouring spirits.  This causes your spirit meter to decrease more rapidly and also tends to push your alignment towards evil.  For a lawful good character, the spirit-eater curse is a minefield of difficult decisions to say the least. 

In theory, this curse is a decent enough idea as well as a central element to the game's plot.  In reality, however, it is poorly executed.  Dealing with your spiritual hunger every once in while would be interesting.  Dealing with your spiritual hunger every second of the game becomes incredibly tedious.  You only have a hundred spirit points, and resting will typically cost you twenty.  This means that every day you have to either surpress you urge (which earns you a few points) or devour a spirit.  The more spirits you devour, the more addicted you become, the more spirits you have to devour...it's an incredibly irritating curse.  By making the curse such a massive burden to the player, it takes an idea that should be enjoyable and makes it into a depressing chore. 

Techinically, this title is more stable than the original NWN2 was out of the box.  At the very least, it did not require thirty minutes of patching in order to be playable.  On the other hand, it still has enough random bugs to be frustrating. For example, the first time I installed the game I found my character was unable to rest.  The button simply did not work.  I had to reinstall the entire game in order to correct the problem.  There were also random graphic glitches which would ocasionally force me to exit to windows and restart.  Your party's AI is fine when it is working, but there are times when you companions will get hung up on scenery and fail to follow you into danger.  They also have a habit of standing, open-mouthed, during battles when they should be helping you out. 

Overall, this is an enjoyable enough addition to the NWN2 universe as long as you are prepared to deal with some frustrating issues along the way.  I certainly hope that when NWN3 is produced, these technical issues are dealt with before the game is put on the shelves.