Up until now this RPG resides on the throne of all games of its kind.
First off you create your own character. For that purpose there’s a wide variety of races (humans, elves, Halflings and some more) and classes available. Among them are fighters, sorcerers, rangers, clerics, druids, rogues and more. AND there are sub-classes for each of those classes.
While discovering the seemingly giant world you a thrown in, you can add five more characters into your group, up to a total of six players that you have to control.
The game begins inside a dungeon. You don’t know where you are or what’s going on. As you move on you will be confronted with a lot of interesting locations, characters and quests.
Everything here, in this part of the D&D world called Faerun, is so very detailed that it can actually feel overwhelming at times (in a good way…).
It’s just a huge game. Now don’t compare it to…let’s say Morrowind (which is also huge, space-wise). BGII is huge because of the tons of different side quests, characters, items, monsters and all the other stuff.
As I mentioned before you can control up to six characters. That happens in a typical point-and-click style. The whole menu system and the inventory management are very handy designed and they just look good, too. Quick bars at the bottom of the screen make it easy to access your most important equipment and/or spells at any time. Still, the pause-function via the space bar is absolutely essential to strategically choose your next actions.
The isometric view and the very detailed graphics fit, just like everything else, perfectly into the game. All the locations look very unique and the magic effects also look great. I really recommend playing BGII at 1024x768, which you need to really enjoy its graphics.
Yet some of the monsters and even the characters look somehow strange. You usually don’t really notice this while playing, but the fact that the monsters and characters are 2-D designed lets them look kind of weird sometimes.
And here comes my special mentioning of the soundtrack: Awesome! I rarely have ever heard better music in a game than here. There are many different tunes that all sound great.
The voice acting is also very well done and you will remember certain characters’ voices even in years after playing the game.
I also really love the voices while a character is casting magic, although sometimes they sound somehow cut in the middle of the spell.
There’s almost no bad critic to give. One thing is that the game gives you too quickly too much you have to take care off. An inexperienced player might feel overwhelmed by this.
And there’s this problem with certain bugs that can occur if you don’t care about patching the game.
Rules wise it seems complicated, because it is! The second edition of D&D rules (called “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”), which is used in this game, consists of too many charts and unnecessarily complicated rules. But you get used to it after a while and understand how things work.
It’s also possible to play through the game in multi-player, but this is only real fun with persons you know well (and who really know how to play the game).
I cannot state often enough how BGII draws you into its world and events. It’s by no means an easy game, but it feels most of the time well balanced. That is, if you take the time to think about what you’re doing in a battle instead of just blindly attacking.
Because of many different scenarios that you can encounter with many different types of classes and the amount of things to find and to do, you will find this game to have an unbelievable replay value.
“Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn” is an outstanding experience for everyone who’s interested in role-playing-games and who has the time to really enjoy this masterpiece.