By: Alex Tilton

To the surprise of nobody BG3 won Game of The Year; It’s massive, high-end, well-executed, and immersive. You’d have to play several times if you wanted to see all of it. If.

I played once, enjoyed it, and I’m done with it. It had enough frustrations to deter me from a second run. It felt as though for every good thing there was an annoying thing to balance it out. So, I’m breaking this review down into The Good, The Bad, The OK, and The Stupid.

The Good: Everything story related, and the power of player choice.

The voice acting, plot, story progression, visuals, music, and level design were superb. Getting immersed is easy. Player choices are hugely influential. Depending on your character type certain areas of the game are much easier or much harder. My character became such a skillful liar that I avoided several battles altogether. I had options other players wouldn’t. This makes the player feel powerful and well-rewarded for their decisions. The developers truly hit this one out of the park.

The Bad: Easy to miss critical stuff.

I don’t want hand-holding, but if a particular item or person is of critical importance then the game should give some indication of this. And BG3 often doesn’t. For example, there’s a late-game mission to sabotage a factory that cannot be completed without either A) getting a special bomb from some people hiding in an unmarked basement or B) locating two specific items and a specific person, all of which are scattered around the factory with no indication of their importance. I had to consult a walkthrough for this, and so did a lot of other people.

This happens far too frequently. There’s a conversation that tips you to an important side quest, but to do it you have to a specific guy before you complete a specific (unrelated) mission. Otherwise, he dies before that conversation can happen. There’s a workaround for this, but again, I had to look it up. And towards the end, a major character becomes un-savable (with no warning) if you don’t do the missions in a particular order. ‘On the other hand, every so often I completed a quest that I didn’t even know I was doing.

The OK: The combat system. 

Combat has a significant learning curve that made the first few hours of the game frustrating. Winning depends heavily on how well you can swivel the camera. Abilities with an area of effect force you to fiddle with the camera angle a lot to avoid hitting your people. It’s easy to click the wrong thing. Determining what will or won’t work on an enemy requires you to select them, click on ‘inspect’, and then read a data sheet on their strengths and weaknesses. Indicator icons that appear when you hover the cursor over your target would have been better. These problems eventually disappear as the controls become familiar, but there’s one problem that never stops.

The Stupid: Unbalanced battles. 

Some fights in this game are stupidly difficult unless you engage in ‘cheesing’ (exploiting the way the game works rather than fighting fair). One is simply unwinnable unless you trick the AI into a bottleneck (which they make no effort to avoid). This turns a nightmare fight into a joke. There are two others I survived by using a particular consumable item I found in a shop. One of these went from impossibly hard to very easy, but the other was just barely survivable even with the item. If I spend 70+ real-world hours leveling up a character, then I should be able to beat the game on its terms, I shouldn’t need to (essentially) cheat. There is an easy mode you can switch to if you’re having trouble, but to me, that feels like admitting defeat.

I also wouldn’t call this a good game for beginners. If you’re not familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game then a lot of things in BG3 are going to be underexplained unless you do a lot of reading. All the necessary information exists in the game, but it adds hours to the playthrough where you’re staring at text rather than doing anything active.

In the end, my evaluation of a game just comes down to one question: Did you have to make yourself finish it, or did that happen on its own?

Apart from certain specific frustrating points, I finished this game without needing any encouragement. It pulled its weight and told a very good story.

But once was enough. As I said at the beginning of this review, I feel no desire to come back again

Image Sources: steam.com & IGN.com