Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition review

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.