Conceptually, I respect what this game is going for. Playing as a grief-stricken guardian/lover desperately trying to resurrect your charge through the use of forbidden magic is always a solid foundation for a fantasy story. As a game, it has decent gameplay feel, though that is held back by the occasional overlong cooldown time on certain melee attacks. The enemies are simple individually but become harder to keep track of in group encounters when you're by yourself, which is how it should be, considering that you're supposed to be resurrecting up to three of them at a time to help you. Most of them are reasonably helpful in their own ways, but many of them feel completely impractical, like the focus was on making them feel different without putting much thought into how they would support the player. I've also seen complaints about the monsters suiciding against bosses, but I found that the ones with ranged attacks could pull their weight just fine as long as I recalled them before they took a nasty hit. The gameplay, graphics and music are all solid for me, but there are two problems that each sunk my experience down by a star, and they're as follows: 1. The dialogue in the cutscenes is painfully overwritten. By that I mean, the dialogue itself is fine, but there's too many addendums and explanations through the protagonist's internal monologues, and it just destroys the pacing of every scene I've watched so far. I've yet to see a story in a game with such an intense need for "show, don't tell." 2. The co-op mode is boring and lazy. I actually bought this game specifically because I thought you could give another player control of one of the resurrected monsters, since co-op was a listed feature. I should've looked it up beforehand, because the discovery that it's just a copy of PC without the ability to summon monsters was a massive disappointment for us. Get this on sale if it looks cool to you, just make sure you adjust your expectations accordingly.
It's been a little bit since I played this, but something possessed me to leave a review when I saw it while browsing Gog's catalogue. I thought it was fine, overall. The main plot is very silly, and the new characters are pretty shallow. Where the writing improves is in its expansion of existing characters and themes. Companions like Khalid and Jaheira are given more depth than they had in BG1, and the dream sequences were surprisingly well written, being on par with Black Isle's writing for most of them. Combat encounters were reasonably challenging and well designed. Despite being an expansion of BG1, it feels more like a lead-in to BG2. Originally, the jump from 1 to 2 was quite jarring. Without spoiling anything, Siege of Dragonspear does an adequate job of bridging the gap and setting up important characters and themes that were explored in 2 but not in 1. The length is what will probably let you down, being about 30 hours on average. I think they probably could've succeeded a lot more if this had been shorter, more focused and kept the tone of BG1 before developing into the tone BG2 had. As it is, the characters are too talkative and the story is very tropey and lacks self-awareness and nuance. If it seems like I'm being hard on the game for giving it 4 stars, I'll admit that my opinion is closer to 3.5, but that's not an option, so I went with 4, since there's a lot of 1 star reviews that I don't think were posted as good faith critiques. Such is life when there's a trans character for over a minute of screentime. My opinion of that character is the same as my opinion for all of Beamdog's original characters; shallow and perfunctory to the story. That said, her being trans doesn't magically make her worse than everyone else. The tl;dr is that the writing ranges from kinda bad to surprisingly good, the combat portions are solid, and it does a decent job of leading into BG2, but it's longer than it needs to be.
Earlier reviews on this site have covered most aspects of this game pretty well already, so I'll try to make this quick and get out my thoughts about this game that I haven't seen brought up yet. When it comes to gameplay and visuals, this game is mostly mid-tier by 2009 standards. The combat has its intricacies, but it feels weightless, and the generic sound effects don't help. The visuals can vary in quality. Most of the environments look pretty good, and I found most monsters pretty appealing. The NPCs mostly look pretty terrible, though, which is unfortunate, given how much time you spend talking to them. Thankfully, talking to them will rarely be unpleasant, which brings me what I think makes this game so compelling: the voice acting. While the voice acting isn't quite to the level of a Bioware game, I was genuinely surprised the first time I played how much of the dialogue was voiced and how natural the bulk of it sounded. Even NPCs that are just wandering around the various settlements can reliably have multiple paragraphs worth of unique, well-voiced dialogue with some involvement with a quest or two. Interactions with NPCs were well designed to the point that it makes the world feel a lot bigger than it is. Another point in this game's favor is the music. Every song fits with and enhances the atmosphere of every area you explore while more often than not being interesting pieces of music on their own. The soundtrack is credited to Kai Rosenkranz, who also worked on Gothic 1, 2 and 3. I'm very happy to report that he is still working, as it sounds like he's taking a major role the music and sound design for the remake of Gothic 1. This game is surprisingly engaging to me, despite the features on paper not really being all that special. I think what it comes down to is that it has great atmosphere and the island you explore is a pretty neat place with a lot of intrigue. It's also pirate-adjacent, if that's something you've been looking for.
