On every criteria used to judge games I've ever been exposed to, Baldur's Gate 2 rates either Excellent or Uniquely Incredible. First I have to discuss one of the most important components of any work of fiction; plot, setting, and characters Plot: The game revolves around a plot of rescue and revenge. The exposition in the beginning gets you into the characters and events through short-punchy cutscenes and encounters, without being confusing or over-the-top. The rising action of the game introduces more challenges and motivations for continuing the game. When you finally get to the climax of the game, all of the events leading up to it make you care about the outcome in more meaningful ways than "Here's the boss, kill them" Setting: The game is set in the classic dungeons and dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms. Every inch of the world has unique character and charm with bumbling bureaucrats, blind cultists, reformed undead, backstabbing drow houses, lying manipulative adventurers, officious mages, and hundreds-if-not-thousands of unique minor characters who add color the the world. Characters: possibly the most recognized area of baldur's gates unique brand of humor. There are about 20 characters you can locate and add to your party, almost any pair of which have completely unique interactions with each other, and all of which have something to say about the choices you make throughout the game. Most are humorous, but seamlessly have character backstory and opinions blended with their persona. Graphics: Baldur's gate 2's graphics have aged extremely well. Hand painted 2d backgrounds with colorful 3d magic effects retain the same visual quality that they had when the game was new. Many 3d games of the era look awful today, but BG2 looks fantastic. The design choices make it smooth and easy to understand what is going on with a minimum of examination. Music and Sound: All main characters are fully voice acted by obvious professionals. The title theme and battle music are some of the best arranged in the history of gaming. All areas are appropriately themed, with no music ever seeming out of place. The segues from one situational music to another is almost completely seamless keeping the feel of the game flowing and fun. Gameplay: It's hard to reduce baldur's gate's gameplay to a simple paragraph, because it's so dynamic. As you control 6 party members with every class being unique and different, the pseudo-turn-based combat allows you to quickly and directly end easy confrontations, but carefully plan and control harder, tricky, or interesting battles. Dialog, reputation, thief skills, non-combat magic and puzzles can have a real impact on the way the game plays out. It can be very satisfying to simply steal an item instead of doing a quest for it. Magic tends to let you change the rules of the battle, instead of just being another way to dish out damage and status effects. Replayability: Aside from the simple changes that many RPGs still use to allow replayability, like morality systems and classes, the unique characters and dialog choices of baldur's gate make different playthoughs feel very different as well. It is not unheard of for people to beat this 40-50 hour game 5 or more times. The sidequests are long, complex, rewarding, and totally optional. Many parts of the main quest have different branches the completely skip some segments of the game. At ALMOST no point does the game feel like a railroad where there is exactly one place you must go next. This game is memorable, fantastic, intriguing, complex, compelling and just plain fun. More than one facet of Baldur's Gate 2 has simply never been paralleled in the 10 years since its first release.
Neverwinter nights' greatest assets were the fact that it was multiplayer, and the customizability. The toolset was great, and the engine was strong. People can and did create wonderfully complex puzzles and worlds. Unfortunately, this created some setbacks. The engine was geared towards playing a single character, and without others to play with, this made gameplay shallow compared to its infinity engine predecessors baldur's gate and icewind dale. The story was held back by multiplayer constraints as well, and thus, lacked the exploration of early games. Being an early 3D game, models and graphics were ugly and tacky compared to same era 2D games, and future 3D games. The campaign had very little quality writing and a lot of dungeon crawling. If you like engaging plots skip to the expansions.
Stronghold is a mixture of the simulation and tower defense genres. This actually really helps both, as simulations don't tend to have a very strong demand for immediate response, making many of them a bit slow paced. Tower defense games are always a bit repetitive and tend to boil down to only a couple core strategies. Stronghold combines the concepts into one game where each covers the other's weaknesses quite well. Just when you feel the monotony of the sim style castle building set in, here comes an approaching army to keep you on your toes. And while the sieges would get tiresome and annoying as the best responses are usually pretty obvious, the way the simulation part restricts your resources creates an interesting challenge for supporting your plan forcing you to make compromises. It's not the best game on this site, but if you like building clever defenses, and enjoy interesting challenges, Sronghold is for you.
