I cannot understand why this game gets so good reviews (almost only 4 and 5 stars). There are good elements, but overall the experience is poor. The good: the story has very interesting elements. The game is very easy to pick up and play, and quite short. I finished it in about 8 hours. The combat is easy to learn. The graphics, if underwhelming, are pleasing and understandable for a 2 people team. There is a crafting system, it is easy and works fine. The bad: the combat is way too dull. It is too simple in my opinion. It basically consists on clicking once on one enemy and the rest is automatic if one wants. It is possible to use powers, but they are not that useful. One could finish the game without them by simply buying many potions (or crafting them) and just drinking them one at a time during combat. There is no character sheet, so the items are equiped from the inventory directly and it is hard to have an overview of what is equiped. The worst thing though is the writing. While the story is fine, and original, there is way too much text. I was constantly put through walls of text that repeated itself most of the time, but I needed to read to make sure I did not miss an important cue. The text itself is not so well written, ending up it boring minutes after boring minutes lost reading it. I play text heavy games a lot, but this time it was very annoring. I also had a crash within the 8 hours I played. This being said, the only negative reviews I saw on this game were talking about the game being Christian and trying to preach to the gamer. I'm an atheist and did not have any issue regarding that aspect of the game, so either it was changed by the dev since the reviews were made, or I'm not so sensitive as those reviewers are. I cannot recommend this game, except for people who do not except any masterpiece here.
The game is good at delivering exactly what we can expect when seing the graphics. It is old-school in design, and very frustrating at times, but overall I enjoyed it. Everything is text based, there are some typos in the text, and the combat is hard, very hard, I died a lot, but wanted to continue the game anyways. The graphics are old-school, but in the end functional and I grew fond of them. All the skills were useful, so I wanted a lot of them, but in the end I was not specialized enough and died a lot. I had to grind a bit and specialize to finish the game. I also saved a lot to avoid encounters at night. Also, it is pretty easy to run out of money. I'd say the game has a balance issue, but it did not prevent me from enjoying it.
I never played Baldur's Gate at all before, and I played the base game (with tales of the sword coast), the Black Pits and Siege of Dragonspear all at once. Siege of Dragonspear felt well integrated in the whole and was better on certain points: new assets looked better and there is a lot more voice acting. The plot was more linear than in the base game, but there is a good amount of side quests as well. I bet most people saying it is trash compared to the base game speak with the nostalgy goggles. The number of characters at once in a screen (fighting or not) was greatly enhanced, making the game more enjoyable, as one can feel more submerged by the crowds. Many people mention bugs or crash, but I did not crash once during Siege of Dragonspear, so the game feels pretty stable to me. Maybe this was not the case when it got release though. The story is excellent, and I liked there were a lot more gray areas than in the base game. Finally, a lot of people keep mentionning a political agenda that Beamdog put in the extension. I think they review bombed the game and most of them never played the game. I tried to find where the dev put his political view in there, and I could not. A lot of people speak of a trans character, but it is so minor I did not even notice while playing the game, so I assume most people mentioning this heard about it outside of the game. And what the **** is wrong with people for review bombing a game for 15 seconds out of 20 hours ! The game is not even close to force feeding this character to you ! Good job by Beamdog, nothing less.
