Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter Preview

Recently announced Atari and Liquid Entertainment’s turn-based Facebook game Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter has received the hands-on preview treatment from RPGFan, which seems reasonably intrigued with what the title has to offer. Here’s a snippet:

The gameplay is traditional strategy RPG fare, but designed for both seasoned RPG fans and casual gamers alike. For instance, upon starting the game, you can create your character from a selection of races (Human, Eladrin, Halfling or Dragonborn) and choose a class: Fighter, Rogue, Wizard or Cleric. You can then customize your avatar’s traits, selecting hair style, facial features, and so on. Finally, you can adjust your starting stats depending on how you want to play. Alternatively, casual players can skip the stat-tweaking and just choose a preset race and class combination and start playing.

As a title designed to be played on Facebook, gameplay and dungeons are tailored for shorter play sessions than your typical console or PC strategy RPG, and Heroes of Neverwinter can easily be played in short 10-15 bursts. In battle, you choose from a wide variety of attacks, spells and special moves to take down your enemies. A Grandia-esque bar is displayed near the bottom of the screen that shows the turn order, so you can plan strategically. If you’re in a hurry – or still learning the ropes – you can set your assistant party members to be controlled by AI. In fact, if you want to completely observe, your whole party can be set to auto-play.