The Las Vegas, Nev., company that launched the real-time strategy genre with Dune II and kept it alive with the Command and Conquer series has now staked out a wide patch of turf in RPGs.

Westwood first tried to break into the role-playing world with Lands of Lore, but weak graphics limited the generally good gameplay. This time around, there is plenty of depth, loads of spells, an interesting "TrueSight" view and a truly rich feel to the product. It gets hard to put down. The starting full-motion video gets you up to speed in a hurry. Our hero Jack is taken from his Florida trailer court and whisked away to another dimension. Why is he chosen? It turns out that Jack’s odd television decoration happens to hold thousands of undead necromancer souls. The last necromancer, the gorgeous antagonist Hecubah, summons a portal to grab this object so she can resurrect her brethren’s souls. Jack gets caught in her plans, but fortuitously runs into a flying airship captain, who becomes his main tour guide to Nox, the realm Hecubah’s from.

Your first decision is to choose from one of three classes: the wizard, the warrior or the conjuror. True RPG fans should be wondering Conjuror? That’s something new.

The standard choice is the warrior, a Conan-esque brute who uses weapons and shields to hack his way through the 11 chapters. The closest he gets to magic is when he uses enchanted weapons and armor.

Then there's the wizard, who can cast more than 50 spells. He sets intricate traps and combines his large array of spells to become a potent selection. Not one to use armor or weapons, his hand-to-hand implement of war is a staff that casts a certain spell whenever it’s used.

Warriors and wizards have both been done before. However, Westwood presents the new conjuror class. A subtle mix of the warrior and wizard, he slings a few spells and can do a little hack-a-troll. This gives him a nice blend of powers. While playing as the conjuror, you often use the charm creature spell (which the wizard cannot use) to enchant a creature. If the charm is a success, the creature will escort you around, hunt everywhere on the map, guard a certain spot or peacefully observe. It’s a handy spell, and adds to the depth of the gameplay.

The conjuror can also summon creatures called bombers, which are like mobile traps. You stick three spells into the bomber spell area, and summon it up. A little round creature with two legs and a tail appears and acts as a charmed creature. If the bomber runs into an enemy, then it will explode and activate all the spells that it was summoned with. Again, it’s a nice creation and really adds to the game. Touches like these are what gave this game such a high rating.

More conjuror features that I liked: in multiplayer, the conjuror can summon an ogre, a swarm of pixies or a gargoyle. The conjuror has an array of spells equal to about half of the wizard’s inventory, so he isn’t just a better wizard. Since magic-types often find themselves out of mana, the conjuror can also use some staves and a bow and arrow (all of which can be enchanted).

Regardless of your character’s role, you can customize Jack’s hair, mustache, beard, sideburns, shirt, pants and shoes. During play, you can customize what he’s wearing to such an extent that strip him down to his underwear, if you want. This much control over your character is good in RPGs.

When I first started playing this game, I feared that Nox was going to be a rip-off of Diablo. Fortunately, it really stands on its own. The storylines are completely different, plus there is the added conjuror. And the Nox map is huge. There are similarities, but then RPGs do have certain requirements. Wizards need books of spells, and dungeons need skeletons. But with Nox, there is much more intricacy to the main map. You’re not just going down, down, down until you get into Hell.

The Nox interface has a superb feel. You can look up spells quickly in the journal. You can sort through your inventory of possessions fairly quickly. The small level map does a decent job of letting you keep track of your progress.

One quibble is with the saving mechanism. First, you can’t do any editing on the name of the save; the system does it for you. And there are limited slots available for saving — about a dozen. There’s a good AutoSave feature, but I never like to be limited in the number of saves I can make. For example, I like to keep a save just before I know I’ve beaten the game, so that I can re-run the ending. With three different classes, and thus three different endings, that’s almost 25 percent of the save slots.

Graphics, which were the downfall of Westwood’s Lands of Lore offering, are much improved in Nox. The new TrueSight feature works very well. It makes sure that you can’t see places that you normally wouldn’t be able to see. You won’t get a view behind rocks or behind a wall when you’re looking through the door. However, you can always see the back of your jeans, along with other things behind you. Not that this is a bad thing. It doesn’t hurt the game at all, and if you couldn’t see behind you, then the action element would be greatly hindered.

There are a few sub-quests in the game, but they never really end up helping that much. This is a big change from Diablo, where you’d get something like the Helm of the Stars or the Obsidian Staff of Apocalypse. Better quests might make a promising area to explore in subsequent editions.

I’d like to see more of Hecubah, in the obvious and more subtle ways. Other than the FMV when you beat her, she is simply a tiny little figure. If there were some way to go one-on-one with her at the end, where she was bigger than a fingernail clipping, it would add a bit of allure.

Also, she does the classic Dr. Evil thing that has ruined many a super-villain: "I'm going to place the hero in an easily escapable situation, involving an over-elaborate and exotic death, not watch it, and assume it all went to plan." Geez. Not even Austin Powers succumbs to those clichéd plot devices.

Overall, Nox is an excellent game. It has some of the best features of the Magic card game, with many similar spells and ideas. The animation is stunning, adding to superb gameplay that is buttery smooth and literally draws you in. I thought the designers did an excellent job of building up the action, and I was howling when I first got to cast the Fist of Vengeance. It was clear that the developers had a lot of fun while they put this whole thing together. It had me glued to the screen for hours, and I found myself casting around the web for hints, clues, strategies, and cheats, all of which were relatively easy to find. The game has a big following already, and it has solid multiplay features, which allow over 30 LAN or Internet players at once.

Up next from the game company that keeps getting it done is Renegade, a first-person shooter. All I can say I, "Hurry!"