I've read the bad reviews on GoG, and honestly I do not understand the animosity. I bought this title on sale a few weeks ago, and have played the entire game to very-nearly 100% completion (I may go back and play an evil party at some point). As of version 2.6.6 the new UI works wonderfully, and the game seems mostly bug-free, with the inclusion of thousands of both original and fan-made bugfixes (rendering fixpack mods obsolete). Yes, they have big black outlines to make sprites more visible for people playing on tiny screens, but this is an OPTIONAL graphics feature which seems to be off by default on the PC version. Yes, the Black Pits game is a bit pointless (basically just a tactical game using the BG engine), but it's separate from the main game and you can easily just ignore it. The new companion NPCs are not perfect, but they're in a similar style and generally have more depth than most of the original companions (people complaining about their lack of content are invited to consider that many of the original companions had no content whatsoever after recruitment (Ajantis, Alora, Branwen, Faldorn, Garrick...). While the writing and voice acting aren't going to win any major awards, they're not bad by any means. Lastly there's the Siege of Dragonspear DLC. Is is as good as BG1? That's debatable, but what it has got going for it is plenty of original (non-recycled) characters, items, quests and (especially) maps. I defy anyone to find a free mod with even half as much original content. The story is a little predictable, but honestly given a mandate to write filler between BG1 and 2, they did a good job in my opinion. If Beamdog issued another major Baldur's Gate DLC, I'd snap it up as soon as it was on sale.
For players who enjoyed Magnum Opus, this is a fine mix of nostalgia and improvements: The new version sheds the Adobe Flash dependency, and adds a story, and some features found in SpaceChem (e.g. in arms in Magnum Opus could not move on tracks). Overall, most of the campaign puzzles were fun. It's nice to be able to store separate solutions to a single puzzle, optimizing for cost, speed and size. At the same time, for a programming-based puzzle game, there are some glaringly obvious missing features: - The game interface does not offer any sort of loop construct (beyond a simple "repeat all previous instructions"), or conditionals. This poor interface/language design makes many levels far more difficult than they need to be (e.g. players may find themselves copying and pasting blocks of instructions dozens of times in order achieve something that could have been done by adding some sort of equivalent of a for-loop, or just allowing the existing "repeat" instruction to start repeating from a chosen point, rather than the very start of a program. - Also missing are subroutines or functions. Players will need to re-write the same basic short grab-rotate-release program sometimes more than a dozen times in a single level. - Multi-armed manipulators seem like a great idea, but they're missing commands to grab/release different arms independently, which severely limits their usefulness. - Late-game puzzles seem to concentrate on cramming complex machines into impractically-small irregularly-shaped areas, which can make them feel more like work than fun. All-in-all I'd say this is a good game, but it cries out for an expansion/patch to add a new/longer story campaign and improve the programming language. If and when that happens, it could turn this into a great game.
