Speaking of the story, without spoiling too much, it starts off as pretty standard RPG fare. You are just a regular guy/gal, living in a small town, trying to enjoy a festival, when suddenly your town is attacked by demons. You are soon sent off on a quest and are off to save the world. The story does get better as you progress, though, and with a completion time of almost 50 hours, dozens and dozens of optional side quests (each with different choices to make during and after the quest), as well as a stronghold of your very own to acquire and renovate, you'll be spending a lot of time in the world of NWN2.
Combat can get out of control easily, but you can pause the game at any time to re-evaluate things.
So how exactly does the world of Neverwinter Nights 2 look? Ehh, it looks ok. It's not that its a horrible looking game, but its not a spectacular looking one, either. You'll spend alot of time in various dungeons and tombs, some of which start to look the same after awhile. When the camera is zoomed out when you are running around in a town or dungeon, the game looks decent. During any of the gazillion cutscenes, however, you start to see the low-resolution textures, awkward character animations, and clipping.
Some of the character models you'll see look pretty good (mostly your AI companions and other major characters), but oddly, the one for your main character (no matter what you choose him/her to look like) seems to be one of the worst models in the game. The spell effects are the coolest looking things in the game. Despite average graphics, NWN2 has some pretty high minimum requirements. According to the game box, you'll need at least 128MB of video RAM, 512MB of system RAM, and at least a Pentium 4. Even if you meet these requirements, the game has not been as optimized as well as it should have, and you'll encounter some stuttering, mostly when walking around a town, casting spells, or with large scale battles.