PS2 Game Review: Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance

Baldur's Gate is an immensely popular series on the PC and and now makes its console debut on the Playstation 2. The developers at Snowblind Studios have exceeded all expectations and produced an excellent action role-playing game with awesome graphics, great audio and insanely fun gameplay including a two player mode. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is an overhead action role playing game in a similar style to Diablo. Unlike the flawed Diablo games, however, BGDA successfully rewards the player with exciting gameplay and a beautiful presentation of graphics and audio. When the game begins, you are a traveler who is mugged in the city of Baldur's Gate. The thieves fail to kill you when the night watch scares them off, but they take almost everything else. Beaten and humiliated, your character goes to the Elfsong Tavern to recover and collect information about the thieves so that he/she may enact revenge on the attackers. What appears to be a simple mugging turns out to be part of a large, dark conspiracy between evil factions across the land, and now is your chance to prove your heroism and crush the evil that plagues the Forgotten Realms.

The combat and movement system in BGDA is similar to the Zelda series in that the player has direct control over the character as opposed to Diablo's clumsy "click and attack" gameplay. At the start of the adventure you can choose one of three character classes: an arcane archer, a dwarven fighter or an elven sorceress. The dwarf is powerful and can take anyone down in a straight up fight, the arcane archer enchants his arrows with magical properties and the sorceress can burn down legions of enemies with her deadly magic spells. Each class is played very differently and can be customized to the player's style. Upon defeating enough enemies you can spend earned points on a large list of feats and abilities. You can, for example, take a small sampling of each spell/ability or save up your experience points to upgrade an existing spell to deadly levels. Combat tactics and skills such as evasion, quick movement, enemy manipulation and flanking are essential to wiping out the hordes of enemies that come after you.

In addition to the addictive single player quest is a two player mode where you and a friend can join up to take on the monsters together. Since you and a friend must share the spoils of war together, teamwork and team strategy skills are important to being an effective pair. You can even import characters from existing games to others if you do wish to start a two player game with your already-developed single player character.

One word accurately describes the graphics in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance: Perfect. There are no problems at all with the graphics, and everything is done right. The game uses full screen anti-aliasing and has no rough, jagged edges at all. Mip-mapping means there are no pixelly, shimmering textures in the backgrounds. Even when dozens of creatures are scurrying across the screen, the game's smooth 60 frames per second framerate does not stutter or hiccup at all. The textures are high resolution and beautifully detailed. The character and enemy models are composed of thousands of polygons each and have no blocky areas. The environments are awesome: all of the landscapes are modeled in painstaking detail and have realtime lighting effects and shadows. The ultra-realistic water effects are simply jaw-dropping. The first pool of water you encounter is impressive enough when you see the ripples and waves caused by your character bounce off the edges of the pool and each other, but the water looks even more amazing later on when hordes of creatures are plunging through it, each creature towing its own wake. Simply put, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for PS2 has the best graphics I have ever seen in a game, for any system including the GameCube and Xbox.

The sound effects are very good as well. The enemies all have sound effects unique to each creature, and every weapon emits a different sound as it strikes its target or clangs to the floor. Jeremy Soule's music is masterfully composed and suits each area perfectly, making me wish that Interplay would release a soundtrack for the game. The music inside of the sewers and crypts are ominous and foreboding while the sound in the town is relaxing. The Elfsong Tavern's spiritual melody is beautiful and soothing, just the remedy for a warrior returning from a fierce battle. The outstanding visuals tend to eclipse the audio, but Baldur's Gate excels in its sound and music.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is the definition of a "next generation" game. Everything about the presentation and the audiovisuals is superb, and the gameplay is solid. If you have room for one more PS2 game in your library this year besides Final Fantasy X, make it Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

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