Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

"God no...Oh God. What have they done...."

I had high hopes for this game. It looked great, and I heard great reviews for this game. There was a shell of positiveness surrounding the Baldurs Gate series that influenced me to buy this game with most of my birthday money[around 50 dollars]. Like most of you, I like role playing games but this is not a role playing game- its a college course. After trying to play this game for 2 hours, I crawled, wounded by my experiencing, trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel. For the 50 dollars I spent, God knows I tried my best to find something uplifting about it. As a seasoned veteran I knew the ropes pretty well, and even became good at the game Arcanum, which is surprisingly similar to Baldurs Gate 2 in some ways, with an instruction booklet as thick as it, but this game died in my hands and it felt like I used my 50 dollars as cheap, John Wayne toilet paper.[Rough, tough, and don't take no crap off anybody]

Graphics[7]

The levels were great. The dark, dank mood was captured well and the spell effects were ok. The sprites were small but detailed as well as the enemies. There wasn't anything great about it that caught my attention, but also keep in mind I could only stand to get through half of the dungeon in the beginning of the game.

Sound[10]

Jim Cummings, who does a whole lot of voice acting, most likely you've heard him once somewhere, is a hilarious barb along with the other cast of characters. The hit sounds don't sound repetitive at all, and the critical hit sound gives the hit that extra umph. Over all the rpg's I've played on PC, the sound for this game as well as the battle music, has got to be the best by far. It's welcoming as well as addicting to humm and think about and makes you want to fight, something other big name rpg's like Diablo and such could have added in to reduce the monotony of battle.

Gameplay[1]

This is what hurts. I should've taken a clue by the instruction booklet, which has more pages than some of my college textbooks. Anybody thinking of making a game like this should consider the fact that if a game takes that much to cover the absolute basics, it doesn't need to exist. Like the instruction booklet, the game windows were extremely difficult to navigate in the heat of battle just to caste a spell or use an item. The alternative is the turn based system which degrades the speed of the game to a crawl and I found unnecessarily annoying. Rpg's were founded on the turn based system and even Final Fantasy for the Nintendo goes much faster with a whole lot less headaches and menu shuffling. A lot of the little catch 22's about the gameplay in this game, weren't covered in the instruction booklet or hidden among other sections that have no buisness covering the topic.
The battles were a joke. 4 and 5 people surrounding a bird missing it for 2 minutes is absolutely ridiculous. There is no reason for it but yet it exists. Maybe I messed up my stats, but that's easy to do with a game as comically complex as this. Baldurs Gate 2 was made by Stephen Hawking for Stephen Hawking, and nobody I know has the time to sit down and learn how to play a game for 3 hours just to survive the first battle, unless you're an invalid.

Control[1]

Windows, windows, everywhere! Shuffling, disappearing, reappearing, going and coming, coming when it's supposed to go. Was it necessary? Could it have been done better? If people who read this has an idea how, that should tell you something. Nowhere in this game was I in any sort of control over my situation. I was getting more critical hits than average hits, and the majority of the time my party members kept missing along with me while the computer seemed to magically assault me mercilessly with incredible accuracy. It made me want to go into the computer and fight for them because somebody must've gouged out their eyes while they were in the cages. So here I am, imagining how much better I could fight than all my party put together while waiting for them to hit enemies. I don't EVER want to live through something as hellishly moronic as that and no RPG fan should.

Overall[1]

If my college had a course for this game, I would take it. I still would want to like this game. Point blank. This is not an RPG where you can pick up and play it, because it is too hopelessly complex, tedious, and design flawed to play it. Maybe I have an intelligence problem, but take a hard look at the types of RPG's being produced now, none of them are as tedious as this, but yet some of them are just as complex and are a whole lot easier to get into. Notice also I didn't rate the ''story'' because there's no need to. Who can suffer through this game to find it? No story is good enough to play something with the mechanics this terrible. Baldurs Gate 2 is nothing, and it wasn't meant to be anything. Try Arcanum, the whole AD&D theme was done worlds better than Baldurs Gate 2. I'm not selling this game, I'm giving it away to somebody as an expensive April Fools joke.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 12/28/01, Updated 12/28/01