I love
Nali Chronicles.
The whole mod felt like a new game the first time I played it - in a more profound way than other big mods like
Legacy,
Xidia Gold,
Operation: Na Pali etc. The RPG mechanics obviously have a lot to do with that! And the
NC team did an amazing job on the spell system.
Incredibly, I found this recent review:
http://jbladefps.blogspot.fr/2014/08/nali-chronicles-review.htmlThe Battle at Nyleve's Falls is a very suitable ending to the campaign in many ways but IMHO it's not the best level of the lot (for example, I feel
The Sea of Despair is better and I really wish I'd been available to comment on it last time in MOTW).
The positives have already been mentioned: the design which lets you take advantage of all the powers you have acquired throughout your journey (yeah it really feels like you're destroying a small army), the nice handling of an ending which reveals that this whole adventure was a prequel to
Unreal (with a rather impressive final cinematic)... and the new music too, of course.
I would also like to stress that the ending actually managed to be emotional for me, like I literally felt a chill go down my spine as I saw NaGaRuuk (the Nali mage the player impersonates all along) expire after channeling all the energy he could muster to "summon" the messiah. Sad but satisfying. Good handling of the story indeed.
The negatives: nitpicking but for a final map, the challenge is mediocre - to be fair, the first time I played through this I almost died at one point (I got one big hit from the giant Warlord) but given the fact that some levels just before the last one (like
The Sea of Despair and
The Temple of Zakaran) were actually quite hard (I remember dying a couple of times), I expected
The Battle at Nyleve's Falls to be
harder.
It's a great map, but it could have been purely positive if the challenge had been greater.
All in all, one of the most unique experiences in the whole of
Unreal/
UT. Yes it has flaws, but fuck that - I am really happy that in the world of
Unreal/UT modding,
Nali Chronicles exists!