Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition review

It’s a well-established fact that Black Isle was the development studio behind some of the best role playing games ever released on the PC, and that Baldur’s Gate was the pinnacle of their achievement. Originally released in 1997, it set the bar with its atmospheric and absorbing storyline, massive open environments and tactical turn-based combat, and still has a loyal fan following today. It’s these fans that have helped bring Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition to PCs, updating the game for modern operating systems and adding a slew of new content.

Both Baldur’s Gate and its expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast, have been rolled into Enhanced Edition, so series veterans should be instantly familiar with its gripping story. The western shore of Faerûn is under siege from bandits and in the grip of a crippling iron shortage, but that’s the least of your worries – your foster father has been murdered and the gates to your childhood home have been closed, forcing you to build a party of adventurers and set out to liberate the Sword Coast.

There’s a healthy 40 hours of gameplay if you stick to the main storyline, but it’s through exploration, completing side quests and recruiting new allies that the game truly comes to life. The character classes, creatures and combat are all based on the Dungeons and Dragons rule set, meaning there are plenty of eccentric wizards, over-zealous druids and insane, hamster-carrying rangers to fill your group with, as well as an entire bestiary of monsters and enemies to clash swords with.

You can pause the game at any time to issue commands to each one of your party members, choosing weapons, spells and attack formations, giving you time to think when in the heat of battle. It’s crucial to survive; younger gamers may be surprised to discover how punishingly hard Baldur’s Gate can be – death comes swiftly to any character, forcing you to the nearest chapel to pay for a resurrection spell. If a particularly vicious creature obliterates them completely, they are gone for the rest of the game, and if your hero goes down you are forced to reload a previous save.

Although the game has been updated for higher resolutions, the isometric viewpoint, low resolution characters and pre-rendered scenery haven’t – this means you’ll easily be able to fit the entire area map on screen at once, but making it difficult to spot small items or select individual party members. We preferred a zoomed-in view, which makes it easier to play but also shows off the age of many of the game’s art assets. The original game had fairly basic pre-rendered 3D cut scenes, which have been replaced with beautifully drawn motion comics, but the graphics are otherwise left untouched. It’s still beautiful to look at, thanks to the stunning backdrops – each one is unique and filled with NPCs, enemies and new areas to explore and loot.

Several new NPCs have been created specifically for Enhanced Edition, each with their own dialog, character portraits and unique attributes. The voiceovers have been lovingly recorded to a professional level, fitting in nicely with the original game and adding some welcome new content for players that have finished the main quest before. Each one is a worthy addition to your party, so it can be a tricky decision when planning who will become a part of your group. Once they join you, each one opens up around five hours of extra content, making each one a worthy investment for new and old players alike.

The most ambitious new addition is the Black Pits, a cooperative wave-based challenge mode that’s entirely separate from the main campaign. It makes a welcome change from the epic storyline, but because we weren’t as invested with our characters we found it hard to enjoy it as much as the main game. It’s the easiest way to try out new character classes, abilities and tactics, but we would have preferred it as an integrated part of Baldur’s Gate itself.

Naturally, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is available on its native platform, but Mac and iOS owners can also experience it without the need for a Windows PC. There’s also an Android version in the works for any smartphone or tablet owners running Google’s mobile OS. The mobile version we tried experienced some slowdown with certain area of effect spells and would crash on a few rare occasions, but was otherwise surprisingly playable. We still preferred playing with a mouse, as it’s far more precise than using your fingers – particularly when looting items from fallen enemies. The party AI system seems a little lacking in places, too – characters occasionally got lost, or took wildly different routes to the rest of the party that usually saw them walk into an enemy ambush.

The developers have included multiplayer, but at the time of writing the only way to connect to another player is by knowing their direct IP address. It is at least cross platform, letting iOS owners play with PC gamers, but the game is best suited to a single player experience.

If you’ve never played Baldur’s Gate, there’s no reason not to pick up Enhanced Edition – it works brilliantly on modern PCs and loses none of its charm, despite showing its age graphically. The combat is just as refined as ever and the story is still gripping. The new content is a welcome extra addition for fans of the original game, without changing the gripping story or shifting the difficulty dramatically in either direction. There’s still some work to be done, which we hope will be handled with a post-game patch, but having finished it, we were impressed with the developer’s devotion to the source material and can’t wait for the Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate 2.