Published 15/04/2022

Gothic

When I think of the games that defined my taste in the medium, Diablo - specifically, Diablo 2 - is pretty high up on that list. It lit a love of dungeon crawlers and loot-based RPGs in my heart, and I’ve been gobbling up the genre ever least. Finally having a decent laptop, it’s been fun to go back and play the classics, and GOG has been nothing short of fantastic to that, and whilst browsing one of their classic sales, I stumbled upon Nox - a dungeon crawler in the vein of the original Diablo, but predating Diablo 2 by a mere few months. In the end, I’d say Nox isn’t quite for me, providing a short, albeit rife with replay value, experience that doesn’t quite hit the nerve center of why I love these genre - but despite its flaws, Nox paints a picture of how the genre could’ve developed if Diablo wasn’t the smash hit that it became.

I had high hopes, going into Nox. Diablo 2 is one of my favorite games ever, and I’m constantly chomping at the bit to find *anything* that elicits the same feeling. And no, I still haven’t quite found it. Yes, I’ve played Path of Exile. Anyway, knowing that Nox came out mere months before Diablo 2’s release, I somehow got it into my head that I’d get that same kind of experience and… and it kind of has the same vibes? The traversal of the world and weird pseudo-dark fantasy aesthetic rings true, but the rest of the game… man, Nox is something else. Not… Not in a good way, more in a… this is a twenty year old game, kind of way. Keep in mind as you read this review that I’ve played a *lot* of these games over the years, and my views have been coloured by titles that, unfortunately to say, are a lot better then Nox. I’m biased, all right, but I really did give Nox a chance. Anyway, I’ll just dive right in, and you’ll see what I mean.

Having no idea what Nox was as I dived in, to my surprise I discovered that Nox is a goddamn isekai - a story where a normal, run of the mill human is transported to a fantasy land. What follows is honestly a fairly stock - if uninspired - fantasy story; join a guild, help out some people, get roped into a bizarre crusade to stop a hot necromancer chick from ????. The only real storytelling happens in between chapters, and that storytelling is… rough, to say the least. More like drunken rambling, as it all comes from the Airship Captain, who’s helping the player because…??? Look, don’t play Nox for the story. Dungeon Crawler stories are never the focus, but Nox is just set dressing, a vehicle to get you running and slaying all over this fantastical world.

If you've ever touched, or even seen any of the Diablo games, or even something like Path of Exile, you’ll know how the basics of these games function. Using melee? Run up to the enemy, bonk with weapons until they go down. Ranged weapons are the same, you’re just firing from a distance. As you quest across the land, you’ll be smashing the hell out of thousands upon thousands of nondescript monsters, earning experience to level up and collecting loot of increasing quality and power and yadda yadda yadda. Look, you know how these games work - there’s a reason there’s the term ‘It’s Diablo with ___!’. Look, I’ll be frank; Nox’s base gameplay is simple, very simple, and even if that’s a staple in the genre at this time, at the very least the class design would pick up the slack. Not here, unfortunately. Not here.

Y’see, at its heart, Nox’s character classes are not interesting in the slightest. Even with its slightly abrupt 8ish hour runtime, you get a grand total of five, count ‘em, five skills, and in the case of the warrior, only two of them were actively interesting and helpful to me. Seriously, 90% of my battles involved me using a berserk skill that charges me into foes, or a kind of grappling hook that brings them to me. The others had niche uses, but the vast majority of my time was spent bashing my skull into enemies, or just left clicking to slap ‘em around with my basic attack. In other titles, whilst they aren’t drowning in skillsets, they’re a far more integrated element of the game - like the Necromancer in Diablo constantly summoning minions or firing bone spears, or the custom array of abilities you can build up in Path of Exile. No skill trees, no real progression beyond getting those five skills, and that just doesn’t feel good, as simple as it is. Seriously, I know Nox isn’t a title on the level of the greats of the genre, and that goes double for its budget, but the character classes just feel so bare bones. Maybe the other two classes are a bit more interesting then the warrior, but that doesn’t excuse only *five* abilities. Even Diablo 1, an innately simpler game, had its spell book system allowing anyone to use a whole host of spells. Look, I love just normal attacking enemies all day and all night, but there’s only so much you can take before it grows more than a little stale.

Now, despite Nox predating Diablo 2, I guess it’s so ingrained in my head that I kind of expected it to have more similarities to the post-Diablo 1 world; open environments to run around in, caves and dungeons to stumble into, side-quests to complete, and to be fair to Nox, it does have all these… in bite-sized pieces. For whilst I’d never really call Diablo 1 or 2 ‘open-world’ per say, Nox is an altogether more linear experience. Rather than, in the course of having a main quest you’d be stumbling upon a multitude of different distractions, Nox opts to keep you relatively on the straight and narrow, always searching for the next major objective. Clear a dungeon, rescue some peasants, kill a necromancer, and thus you’ll always be moving forward through a variety of landscapes - and what a variety that is! Jungles, volcanos, crypts, snowscapes; Nox will take you all over an otherwise admittedly shallow and unexplained world, but the variety does a lot to deal with the linearity and repetitiveness that Nox holds. Move from point A to point B, get quest, complete quest, repeat until you beat the game. It’s not necessarily a bad thing - it’s just a different way of doing things, but it’s still not the most engaging format in the world; it just makes it all feel a little bit smaller, y’know? As an aside - it’s a small thing, but the general movement of the player character feels really good - like you’re charging forth into an uncharted world. I dunno, that just stuck out to me.

I should throw out that there *are* side-quests, to be fair, but these are generally pretty one-note and forgettable, usually involving just killing an enemy or grabbing an item, usually with a pittance of a reward in return. There’s nothing to attach me to any characters, build up the world, villages, or even really the individuals giving me the quests. They’re just kind of… there, neither good nor bad. I just wish there were more of them, or there was just more *to* them.

The loot, the core of all of these games, doesn’t have much going for it either. Outside of a handful of plot items, you’ve got boring junk like ‘Iron Longsword of Embers’ or ‘Warhammer of Sparks’, and even these additions do nothing to spice up the combat in lieu of a more involved skillset. And on that note, why does everything break so easily? Loot RPGs like this, at least from my understanding, are all about the progression - better armor, better weapons, better stats. It’s the foundation, but your equipment is constantly breaking and crumbling to dust. Sure, this has the benefit of making you value scrounging for new loot a little bit more, but with a total lack of resources to repair anything just makes this an exercise in frustration, especially when you’re losing powerful weapons in the late game, being forced to use much worse weapons against the most powerful enemies in the game. Y’all who hated weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild, steer way, *way* clear.

Now, I’m not going to make the claim that enemies in this genre of games are ever particularly interesting, but the ones in Nox heavily ping-pong from being just ‘there’ to some of the most frustrating, annoying foes I’ve dealt with in a while. The difficulty of this game is pretty much tied to what kind of enemies you’ll be taking on. The majority of them, the likes of skeletons, zombies, animals aren’t too annoying, but as you get further in the game, certain unique foes turn up that pose a bit more of a challenge - at least for my melee-focussed Warrior - then the common rank and file foes. Foes bristling with electricity that just killed me when I hit them, giant foes that would deal half my health in a single blow, and the vampires - the bloody vampires. In the last dungeon of the game, I ran into these vampire (I think they were at least - they were bats that transformed into warriors) dudes that, no matter what I did, would kill me in two, three hits tops. They moved so fast, and attacked so quickly, that my only recourse was to use the Warrior charge to hit him, run away, wait for it to recharge, then do it all again. These enemies aren’t the norm, don’t get me wrong, but the fact is that enemies that feel so opposite to the pure hack’n’slash nature of the game… It just feels so bad. Thank god for the quick save feature, I guess. There are a handful of boss fights splashed throughout the game, but for the most part these are pretty stock encounters with just enhanced versions of normal enemies, with only the final boss sticking out as having any real sense of uniqueness to speak of, as you’re given an overpowering, electrical machine-gun like staff that just let’s you go to town on everything around, it’s good fun.

Thankfully, combat isn’t the only thing Nox is throwing at you - they aren’t as abundant as I’d otherwise like, but there are a handful of puzzles thrown in from time to time. Sometimes you’ll have to use pressure plates to advance, or tip toe through a minefield of thin, cracked floor. Hell, there was a huge room, filled with spikes and powerful foes, but also dotted with orbs that’ll bounce you around like a pinball. These grow in complexity and number in the back half of the game, and whilst they occasionally can frustrate, they’re simply more interesting then much of what the game offers. To make things better, these traps and puzzles can be used against your foes - stuck in a room with giant robot golems? Get them to run into the insta-kill lasers! It’s always satisfying when an extra level of interaction is thrown into these kinds of mechanics.

One of the big ways Nox stood out was in its class system - no, not really how they actually play, we’ve already gone over that. Depending on the class you pick - the typical Fighter/Mage/Rogue archetypes we know and love - parts of the game will be entirely different to encourage replay value. Full disclosure, I played this game a single time, as a Warrior, and thus had unique chapters where I initially trained as a warrior, and another where I carve a bloody path through a tower of wizards. Spoilers, whilst I don’t hate Nox, I didn’t love it enough to go ‘round a second time, but the very fact there is reason to push through this game a second or third time, with totally new content is pretty cool - even Diablo 2 grew a little stale on repeat after repeat. Could there be a sequence where a Wizard is taking on an army of purely melee Warriors? That sounds pretty awesome, not gonna lie.

Also, I just gotta shout out the voice acting in the game; whilst I wouldn’t say it’s particularly… good, the voice acting has this general vibe of everyone knowing the product they’re involved in is a bit ridiculous, and thus they’re all gonna play into that madness. There is a line in the Warrior quest, during the wizard tower invasion, where the player stumbles into a classroom - the teacher, a wizard with the most bogan Australian accent I can think of, turns towards you, and without missing a beat, yells ‘All right, students, your final exam: kill him!’. I genuinely got killed because I burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of the line, taking a half dozen fireballs to the face in the process. I don’t love a lot about this game, but I love this voice acting *so much*.

To wrap up this review, I like to Imagine Diablo, which preceded this, as the point before a crossroads - one way heading to Diablo 2 and everything that followed, providing a solid main quest with substation side content and more open game design. But there’s the other way, holding onto the looting and dungeon crawling, but emulating more traditional action adventures, in the form of Nox. It’s just a fascinating concept to imagine, considering Nox came out first, that this could’ve been the game that defined the genre. Honestly, I doubt that would’ve taken off in that way even if Diablo 2 never came to fruition, but it’s still food for thought.

Overall, I didn’t hate Nox, even if perhaps I was a bit strong in voicing my criticisms. Its class-dependent storyline, pace of combat and variety of locales do a lot to help it stick out, but it’s just so mediocre to bad in so many ways. Its more focussed linearity fails when combined with poor class design, boring loot, and enemies that range from nothing to extreme exercises in frustration. It has its moments here and there that really shine, especially its puzzles and voice acting. If you’re a huge fan of this genre, Nox might do something for you, but for now, I’m content with experiencing a bit of this brand of dungeon crawler history, but I think that’s where Nox best remains - history.