Baldur's Gate 3

This is the new entry into the venerable Baldurs Gate series. It has big shoes to fill as the original entries have become lionised by players over the years. What I can say is this is a very good game. Built around 5e but not exactly 100% RAW. It is broken into three acts. The 1st deals with setting up the story and the dilemma the players find themselves in. Alliances can be made and broken. Eventually your travels take you to the underdark in search of answers. Act 2 sees you following your first real clue and you enter the shadow realms. Act 3. This is were you head to Baldurs Gate and trying to come up with a plan to deal with the dilemma once and for all. Acts 1 & 2 are very well fleshed out. Not surprising they got the most attention during development. Act 3 feels very undercooked and rushed at times. It just about holds together though. The final end scene is a little rushed (no spoliers) and was a little underwhelming. The combat is amazing. The spells are very satisfying. There is plenty of cool loot. Characters look amazing as is the voice acting. Its just let down by the curse of xcom - dice roller clusters around the low end making you miss high % chance to hit targets. The undercooked third act was frustrating at times. I am sure that Larian will work on this as they are bound to release a GOTY version at some point. No DLC is planned, so I suspect it will be QOL changes we will see. Its a good game. Not a 10/10 or a 9/10 but it is a damned good game.

The first chapter is overall worthy all praise this game has gotten. I was immediately hooked, and enjoyed the second real D&D game (as it is turn-based, ToEE was the first) immensely for many, many hours. The writing is good, the characters are mostly good/believable, the music is fantastic sometimes. A clear 5-star. The only thing I don't like is the models for some demi-human races. With chapter 2 the quality dropped noticeably in my opinion - even the music dropped in quality. But the game was still good - that is, until I came to a certain point in the story, where (in part extremely) bad writing combined with real-world politics really was a huge turn-off. The game dropped to 3/5 in my book, and there it stays. For if the end of chapter 2 was at times painful to watch, chapter 3 goes completely bananas when it comes to political correctness, cringe-worthy dialogs, and very shallow characters. I mean, the 2 arch-villains are almost caricatures - one looks like glam-rocker from a very bad band, and the the other sounds like a cackling madwoman who is everything but intimidating. The entire dramaturgy falls into into shambles, one might say. What saves the 3 stars is the endgame/-battle, which was quite entertaining. Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely worth playing, but expect quite a lot "facepalm" moments from the end of chapter 2 and onward. I hope to see mods fixing the aspects of the game which needs fixing, now that the toolkit is available (I hope it will be so here on GOG?).

It's got a bit of a Marvel feel to it—not a good thing. The turn-based combat drags. Obviously incredibly popular with a lot of polish. You either like Larian's writing or you don't: I don't.

I didn't expect anything too similar to old BGs so I did not get dissappointed. There's still a lot of glitches around and the game weights a lot so with every update there's an issue of downloading lots of data (that's why I don't update too often). I like the mechanics of turn-based-combat though! To be honest it's my favourite part of the game (after cheesy attempts on romancing the companions) and it's a lot of fun - at least for me. Character creator is great too. Sadly not many rpg's can keep me interested in the main story, but BG3 doesn't fail here, surprisingly! The game's sometimes challenging but also rewarding in my opinion. If you're looking for a fantasy dating simulator with morally ambiguous characters - go for it! It's lots of fun, not gonna lie. If you're looking for the good old Baldur's Gate experience, you might want to skip this one. And as I said in the title - if you want to buy it wait for the final release. Replaying (almost) the same scenario because the game got updated and your previous saves are lost gets quite tedious after short time. I will gladly return to this game after it's finalised

If you ever asked me: "I can only buy one game this decade, what should I get?", I'd answer, get this game.