Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

Out of the four Snowblind Engine action RPGs (this, the sequel, Champions of Norrath & Return to Arms) this is the weakest but first entry of the anthology. The customisation, level designs, NPC interactions and loot aren't as great as the latter games but Dark Alliance was a great starting point of it all. It brought Baldur's Gate to consoles, a wider audience, moved to D&D 3E and introduced a by-gone era of incredible hack n' slashes with a surprisingly addicting gameplay loop. Most of the game is dungeon crawling and repetitive weapon swinging but the games have charm and atmosphere. The lighting and water effects were incredible for its time and the simplistic nature of the combat makes this a great game to drop in and out of at anytime. As for the PC port, this is a miracle upon men as the game remained console exclusive for almost two decades and now we can play it DRM-free. However, this new release IS NOT a remake NOR remaster... it's a straight-up port. Original assets but made to run on modern machines. No clever AI algorithms, UI upscaling, bug fixes, new content or anything of the sort. If you've played this on console you've already seen everything. ...If you're new to this game and sub-genre of action RPG however, you're in for a real treat! They don't make games like this anymore and the fact the developers resurrected this forgotten gem is truly, truly amazing. I hope the sequel and subsequent Champion games come next, DRM-free!

29.99€ for a game that came out 2001 for PS2?! Why is this and it's successor BG: Dark Alliance II so overly expensive? Even discounted, (only -20%...) still way too expensive. I love both of the really fun ARPGs, especially in co-op it's a blast, but at this price? No way.

I would give Baldur's gate Dark alliance a 4 out of 5 back when it was on the PS2. It was the most repetitive and linear of the snowblind ARPG's as it was their first one. The three that followed and many of the games it influenced were better. Even though they were better this is still an excellent game. However this port is just lazzy, I tried running it and quickly found that everything runs ridiculously fast when run on my radeon card. Even when limiting the game to 30 frames per second which is what it was originally. Everything still runs at a 100 miles per hour. Game has no options other than what was in the PS2, infact everything is exactly as it was on the PS2. After failing to get the game to play at a normal speed I fired up the emulated version which immediately worked perfectly. It's pretty bad when an emulated version of a 20 year old game works better than a new release. I would say if you like ARPG's and are willing to take the risk that it may not run correctly then this is a good game but very over priced. If it was running correctly 10 pounds would be a fair price not the 30 pounds there asking.

Tested on Pop!_OS 21.10 on a fresh install with a wired DualSense (PS5) controller, both on its own and running through Steam (as a non-Steam game in Big Picture Mode). Both times, the game worked perfectly and scaled up to my desktop's resolution. In-game controls worked perfectly (only tested with controller, not mouse and keyboard). The game does indeed have a lack of graphical settings, even basics like fullscreen/windowed or which resolution to use. If you can do without these and have it work first time, the game is fine, but hopefully these will be added in a patch soon. I did not expect this game to release with native Linux support, but it seems to work just fine and you'd never know the difference between this and a game console or Windows version once it's running.