After 55+ hours and 4 attempts at playing BG2EE, I give up. Here are some of the highlights of bad things: 1. The game doesn’t tell you that you should actually only make your main character and start playing, building your party as you go. If you start with a full custom-made party, and ignore the “story mode pre-made characters”, then you will never know a huge portion of the story. 2. Lame main characters, especially Irenicus. He sounds so bored and disinteresed in everything. So, why should I take him or this game seriously? Minsc sounds like a stereotypical fool. Of course he drops lame one-liners. Again, am I supposed to take this game seriously? Why do you have grisly quests and explicit descriptions of murders and such on one hand, and on the other you have a joke character like Minsc? 3. Bad voice acting overall. It even cuts off at some parts, and the volume seems way down for some sentences. 4. Kidnapping of your party members. And then you have to do a whole quest(line) to get them back... 5. Some infuriating quests, where it turns out you were used by some NPCs to do what they wanted, and not what you thought you were doing. 6. You have to have a balanced party or you’re playing with a huge disadvantage. 7. The game is intentionally unfair to you. 8. There is nothing likeable in the game. It is a dirty, aggressive, deceiving, and bad world. 9. Knowing D&D rules is a huge plus. 10. Supposedly you have a choice, but actually you don’t: You can choose to do some things the other way, but most of the time it will be 10 times harder and not worth the effort. Because it comes down to the same thing. 11. Backtracking and constant back and forth: Especially running back to the inn to rest, so your spells can reset and you can heal your party.
I don’t recommend the game because of the difficulty spikes and story. The first part of the game is enjoyable, and I could have recommended the game solely based on that. However, there is a sudden difficulty spike when you reach a certain area in the Story Mode. Not just the difficulty, but the story changes too, and becomes quite grim and edgy, which I did not expect. There are some very important moments in the story, for which you want to find the resolution and answer, but unfortunately you have to go through a lot more bosses before moving forward with the story. The biggest offender for me is the last boss fight in the Story Mode. I've played the game on normal difficulty, and could not beat this boss in a reasonable amount of time, with reasonable effort. This gave me a lot of frustration, as I wanted to see how the story progresses, and didn't really care about fighting anymore. In the end, I had to lower the difficulty to beat this boss, and I don't really like that, but it's better to do so than waste time and energy. Especially because of the way how the game ends. The goddess Grindea is sadistic and the developers are sadistic. You have to beat the Arcade Mode for more story, and I don't like this decision. The revelation at the end of the Arcade Mode is not worth your struggle to beat it. I have to shorten my review, so I will omit spoilers. The story really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I was quite offended that the developers thought that the player should go through such hell to be served such psychopathic material. When I understood what was happening, or, what had happened in that world, I felt disgusted. It felt like the devs pi**ed on me. Some good parts: first 50% of the game, storytelling through environment, artifacts and interactions between them. Unfortunately, it might be that they are just parasites, animated, but not living objects, as the player may think. If this is true, that makes me even more sad and disappointed.
