User Rating: 5.5 | Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II PS2
I've played through 6 and a half hours of this game. I've cleared out all the pre act 1 level, and all 3 levels in the initial town. It was pretty clear to me after seeing the intro movie, that the graphics were not great, and the very first game level looks ultra bad. The lighting on the interior levels is really poorly done and the game looks real dark as a result, so you pretty much have to crank the brightness on your television up to a point where black looks like grey just to see anything. The original games graphics were pretty good, and a quick look at the credits for this game confirms that they have indeed used new graphic artists who are clearly not as talented as those used for the original game. The default view is now a little closer to the action, and they have even added a zoom feature so your character can look quite big on screen now. The frustrating part for me though was the difficulty level. Monsters hardly ever drop healing potions, and breakable objects rarely yield pickups. As a result expect to do a lot of dying and a lot of loading and redoing to get past parts of the opening levels. If it wasn't bad enough that you cant heal yourself until you get suffcient quantities of healing potions, monsters can now block attacks, and this leads to a pretty unrewarding game experience compared to the first game, and even more dying. Another thing I didn't like was that the game path was not linear. In the original game you always knew what you had to do, but you just had to navigate the maze like levels to find the objective. In the intial levels, you are given about 3 areas to clear out, but it doesnt matter what order you clean them out in. I can't help but feel my decision to clear out the mansion first was what lead to my 50 deaths in 6 hours, because the other 2 levels were extremely easy. One of the things that makes Diablo II a great game, is that the difficulty seems to scale with your characters strength, but with this game you are given freedom to choose what order to clear out levels, but the difficulty for each level seems to be set independant of your character. You would think 6 and a half hours into the game, that I would have a compelling story on my hands, but unfortunately that's not the case. At the beginning of the first game you are attacked by a group of thieves, and whilst recovering in the tavern are tasked with clearing out their rat problem, which of course leads into the story when you discover the gateway to another land. However in this sequel, the story doesn't seem linked to your character in any way. You find out that the 3 characters from the original game killed the bad guy, but that was actually a good thing for the new bad guy. But that's about it. I couldn't stop playing the first game, yet I don't feel compelled to pick up my gamepad at anytime to keep playing this one. I'm sure it will get good sooner or later, but 6 and a half hours in and there has been nothing amazing happen yet, so I have my doubts.
