Game:

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001)

Duration: 9:21:55

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Part 2. I've got to say that I found this way more enjoyable than Diablo. I'm not exactly sure why that is. They are both very similar in their respective gameplay. Honestly, I think it comes down to the inventory. Diablo is a ton of fun to play, but the inventory management is quite awful. You have limited space and constantly have to shuffle things around, while in Baldur's Gate you just have a carry weight no need to worry about organization. You also get to expand you carrying weight. It makes inventory management much more enjoyable for myself. I chose the elven sorceress and boy was the games first half brutal. Your magic helps but is extremely limited early on and most enemies can do serious damage if not 1-shot you. I do like that the game doesn't pull its rules from Dungeons and Dragons and is very loose with keeping to the traditions. For example: the sorceress can equip heavy armor and cast magic still. I love it. She's a glass canon and by the end of the game was nuking all the riff-raff with ball lightning. One or two casts and everything was dead. She certainly starts out slow and the early game is rough. I spent a lot of time just blocking and squeezing in attacks when I could. The game starts out nice and introduces you to the mechanics in an easy way. You have a main quest but there are a few side quests you can undertake as well. The sad part is that side quests disappear after the first act and there really isn't much in the way of side content. I found that really disappointing. There's a ton of gear to chose from and loot is plentiful. You can build your character to your liking. The classes are limited to just 3, which is a little disappointing. I was hoping for something more akin the main series as far as choices go. There's a nice variety in enemies. Every new region is throwing new creatures at you and all of the bosses are pretty damn cool as well. I played on normal and this game was pretty rough, so the difficulty is there. The regions you get to explore are all varied as well and rarely feel repetitive. I think my biggest gripe was that the camera control was sometimes taken away from the player in some areas for what would seem like no reason at all. The camera would still shift of its own accord I just couldn't control it. That was frustrating.Another bit of an annoyance was when I realized the game wanted you to farm chests for better gear. I guess I really shouldn't complain because that is what this game is about. It's just that farming chests slows down the actual game. I want to bash faces in, not reload chests for hours hoping that the item I want drops or is even in the chests item pool to begin with. I also did the gauntlet challenge with Drizzt. That was pretty brutal and I got my butt handed to me for a while. I did manage to discover a cheese though and was able to import my character into the game after Drizzt died and was able to beat it that way, which certainly was cheating. I went back and did it legitimately though and victory was oh so satisfying. Holy crap is it rough though.The controls for the game work well enough and they let you rebind every button on the controller which is a godsend since the default controls hurt my brain juice. My biggest complaint is cycling through spells. It's not great and would have been great to have some sort of hot keys to easily cast what you wanted. All in all it was a really fun time. Enjoy my blind playthrough.

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https://www.twitch.tv/cereal_ki11ah

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