Firstly, this game definitely deserves its 91 Metacritic score. The setting, story, mechanics and everything else is top notch. And that's coming from a guy that hasn't played Baldur's gate or anything similar yet, let's say Diablo I & II are the most similar I've played. Graphics, sound, scenery are all great. Personally I would have liked a bit more voice acting done for your character (who is silent except for a few phrases in combat and similar). Gameplay wise, your party consists of you and up to 3 other characters, and the best gameplay feature for me is setting tactics for every party member, which means you can set behaviour for all of them and mainly play as your own character, taking control over other characters only if they're in a pinch and you have to manually override their behaviour. I love the story - medieval fantasy. Lots of sidequests, approval mechanics for your companions, romancing, dungeon clearing... And all of that backed up by a great 'save the kingdom/world' story which has tens of possible endings depending on your choices and RPG style. Now, the only stuff this game doesn't have going for it are bugs. Okay, there is a memory leak so the game gets sluggish after playing a couple of hours, just restart the game and it will be ok. Okay, sometimes the game randomly crashes, there is a quicksave feature so if you spam F5 you never lose more than a couple of minutes of gameplay. Okay, some quests are bugged so you have to use workarounds to make them work properly (the Wiki on this game is really good). But the worst thing is when you invest 70+ hours in your character and then a quest in the Awakening expansion decides to delete every piece of OP equipment you have been collecting for your character. I'm playing this 10 years after its release and they never got around to fixing that, so that's definitely the biggest grudge I have against this game. So be wary and make separate manual saves often! Other than that, fantastic game.
