Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 - Australian Review (Reviews)

Ed Dawson, GamePro Australia

13/04/2004 10:05:19

If you’ve already played Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, this title is more of the same. It picks up the story threads and takes you on all new adventures, essentially adding a campaign and some minor improvements. If you were hoping for a PC style, extremely strategic experience, you’ll be disappointed. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 is basically a realtime 3rd person action game dressed up as an RPG. It strongly resembles Diablo, with a souped-up statistics and abilities system. The controls are akin to the venerable Gauntlet series, in that you’re basically choosing a direction to run, blocking, casting spells and hitting things. But its forgiving, in that you don’t have to perfectly line up an opponent to hit them, and you don’t need to choose from a range of different melee attacks.

However, you are saved from the materialistic collection and sale of items from every single enemy. You’ll only find things you can use, for the most part.

The game sports a nice range of weapons and armour, with early level items rather honestly described as “shoddy”. You can now upgrade weapons and armour yourself, at the workshop in town. You embed special magical jewels into sockets on the weapons and armour, once again, as in Diablo. There is a complex range of effects however, beyond “white gem adds lightning damage” – mixing them up produces interesting results, which you can explore.

You can play through the entire single player campaign with a friend, in the two player cooperative mode. This is rather cool and works well, but it’s a crying shame that this multiplayer mode wasn’t expanded for system link or online play, with more players. Also, there isn’t any separate multiplayer maps. Perhaps they are planning a more ambitious online title?

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 is another RPG game that dives straight into action territory, yet without sacrificing all of the depth. It is undeniably entertaining and well presented.

8.5/10

Graphics: 4.0

Sound: 3.5

Control: 4.0

Fun Factor:

Scoring scale: 1-5

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Publisher: Interplay / Developer: Black Isle Studios / Release date: 27/03/2004 / Genre: Action, RPG / OFLC Rating: M (15+)