gemini://pennywhether.xyz/articles/Videogames/PCGames/nox.gmi

After Diablo came along, the game opened the floodgates for a slew of pointy, clicky isometric action RPGs on the PC. Some of these games made a pretty decent splash, proving themselves to be more than mere copycats of Blizzard’s popular release. Nox was one such example of this.

Released in 2000, it was developed by Westwood Studios in the latter years of the developer’s life, being one of many, many popular studios from the 1980s and 90s that were bought up by Electronic Arts at some point only shuttered a few years later.

In Nox, players take on the role of Jack (although you can change his name to whatever you want). He’s a young guy from Earth that has somehow been transported to the world of Nox where a few decades earlier a group of necromancers had taken over. However, a legendary warrior named Jandor managed to defeat them with the Staff of Oblivion. In the wake of this, Jandor comes across an orphaned infant. Not sure what to do, he leaves her in the care of an ogre village, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. While playing the game, Jack visits several perfectly safe human settlements where the kid could have been left, rather than being left among the highly warlike ogres. This is all the more vexing because that baby grows up to become Hecubah, the big bad of the game. She too has become a necromancer, and is hellbent on getting the components of the staff which has since been disassembled by the wizard Horvath, and its components locked away for safety. Maybe if Jandor had done a better job of finding foster parents for Hecubah, the world of Nox wouldn’t be in peril once more. Then again, if that was the case, we wouldn’t have a game, now would we? But I digress...

So, yeah, Hecubah is a bit of a problem, and it’s up to Jack to put an end to her shenanigans. When starting a new game, players can decide to be a warrior, a conjurer, or a wizard. These provide a different experience in a number of ways. First, there’s the obvious gameplay component.

Warriors are predominantly a melee class that is well suited for getting up close and personal with a sword and shield (it is possible to use shurikens for ranged attacks, but by and large the class is focused on melee). They also learn various abilities that essentially function as a substitute to spells, but instead of consuming a mana pool upon use, players must wait on a cooldown before reusing the ability.

Conjurers can use a decent amount of magic, and are fairly capable when it comes to melee combat, but prefer to keep their distance with a bow and arrows. What really makes them special, though, is that they have the ability to summon creatures that can help them in battle.

Finally the wizard is exactly what one would expect: lots of high powered spells for blowing things up while being limited to simple, usually cloth, armor. While wizards have plenty of spells at their disposal, they cannot summon creatures to fight for them.

While picking a class, there’s actually a little bit of character customization that can be done. It’s basically simple stuff like choosing a name besides Jack for your character and deciding on the color of his hair, skin, and clothing. This part has some positively VIBRANT color choices that can all be mixed together. If you like your characters to have sky blue hair, a hot pink beard, yellow and green t-shirt, with purple pants, then Nox is the game for you!

One thing that’s nice about Nox is that it isn’t just a matter of choosing a class, only to be subjected to the exact same story regardless. Players’ experience will be very different depending on what they decide to play as, with each having a unique story. There are some characters that are present regardless as well as some towns and areas Jack will visit, and of course Hecubah is always the big bad, but with such different narratives depending on the class one chooses, there is a lot of incentive to replay the game as each.

I would also argue that choosing a class is choosing a difficulty setting to a degree as well. The warrior campaign is by far the easiest, with the wizard being the toughest, and the conjurer striking a middle ground. The warrior’s survivability makes things a lot easier to manage while the wizard is very much a glass cannon, especially toward the end of that campaign. That being said, the wizard gets much more manageable once players become comfortable with kiting and make smart use of buffs and debuffs.

As one travels across the world of Nox, the campaigns are divided into 10 chapters that keep players on the straight and narrow. Maps start off fairly small and linear, but get larger and larger with more opportunities to explore as the game progresses. There are also many hidden rooms and passages throughout, usually hidden away behind destructible walls that are easily knocked down by a good whack from a melee weapon. Sometimes these can be difficult to see, although that could just be due to my eyesight not being all that great.

Environments range from dungeons to villages, swamps to caves, even frozen wastes and undead crypts. There are a lot of different places to explore. My favorite tend to be the more poorly lit locals, as they have a bit more of an ambience to them and you need to pay closer attention for traps and the like in them. This is further enhanced by the game emphasizing Jack’s field of view. It does this by shadowing out areas obstructed by large objects. Examples include when walking past pillars, or when trying to see through doorways. The game also tries to help players through this mechanic by occasionally having windows that can be peered through, giving hints of traps or ambushes to come.

In terms of enemy types, there’s a decent amount including popular species such as bats, spiders, wolves, undead of various types, ogres, bears, man eating plants, weird treasure chest mimic thingies, and no lack of imps. Some of these are push overs, while others can be surprisingly challenging for monsters that are supposed to be more or less fodder. One strange thing about fighting them is that they seem to give diminishing XP over time. It’s not even a matter of the XP going down as Jack levels up and begins to get stronger than his adversaries. I regularly saw monsters of the same type reward less and less XP while Jack was still the same level. I have no idea why this happens.

I guess it doesn’t really matter too much because Jack will usually be around level 10 by the time he gets to the final chapter. There isn’t really an opportunity to out level the monsters late game.

One thing that is a bit disappointing in Nox is that there isn’t a huge variety of weapons or armor. There are few types of each that are viable for each class, and they can be of varying degrees of resilience and have enchantments on them that add different types of resistances. People more used to Diablo games with a huge selection of weapons and enchants will notice a stark difference in Nox with regard to this. Equipment also has durability, so it will need to be repaired from time to time. If players aren’t careful, their armor can actually be destroyed and lost forever if it gets too damaged, so it is actually useful to carry backup gear to swap into when something particularly valuable is getting worn down.

A couple of other things I haven’t mentioned I’ll put here. It can be like the potpourri category on Jeopardy. First is that there is the occasional puzzle in some of the dungeons. They’re not hard and they’re not common, but they’re there. It’s a nice change of pace from wanton destruction, so yay puzzles. The other thing is that Jack has the ability to jump by hitting the space bar. It’s something one doesn’t see often in these sort of action RPGs, and I wish more games had it. Players can use the ability to jump over traps, leap over small furniture, and avoid falling down pits. It’s actually quite handy.

Visually, besides the neat line of sight effect, and lighting, what Nox has to offer is alright. Not amazing, but it gets the job done. One thing it does particularly well are the character portraits when talking with others. People like the airship captain and Horrendous, leader of the warrior faction (and, yes, that is actually his name) look particularly good. There aren’t any gigantic standout bosses or anything, it’s largely atmosphere that carries the game visually.

Actually, it is the audio that really stands out here. The voice acting is generally very good, especially when compared to a lot of other games of the period Nox came out in when this would often be particularly terrible. Hecubah, the airship captain, and Horvath are definitely standouts here in terms of quality performances. There’s the occasional bit character that sounds like they're phoning in their lines, but the people voicing the main characters consistently do a good job.

Music is also quite good. It doesn’t have a huge “look at me, look at me!” sort of presence, but it’s certainly more than just simple, atmospheric pieces. The score was composed by Frank Klepacki who did a ton of music for Westwood Studios including working on the soundtracks of Lands of Lore, The Legend of Kyrandia, various Dune games, as well as quite a lot of work on the Command and Conquer series soundtrack. So, if you like his stuff, there’s no lack of it in Nox.

On the whole, Nox is a solid action RPG with a good amount of exploration and atmosphere. It’s really nice that the developers made each class a very different experience to play through as. So there is quite a lot of replay value. Usually when people bring up games in this genre from the late 90s and early 2000s, they will mention Diablo, and possibly Sacred. Nox doesn’t often get brought up, which is too bad. People curious to explore the earlier days of PC action RPGs should definitely check it out, as it still holds up well even today.