Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance Retrospective Review

The folks at GameNTrain are offering a retrospective review for Snowblind Studios’ hack’n’slash spin-off of BioWare’s Dungeons & Dragons role-playing saga, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and award it a 3.5/5. Here’s a couple of snippets:

Dark Alliance can be played as a single player adventure, or you and a friend can team up and take on the evil forces together. With only three playable characters, and the ability to choose the same character disabled, there can be tiny disagreements on who uses what characters. It should also be noted that the genders in this game are set. In fact, there is no character customization outside of the armor and weapons that are equipped on each character. There are plenty of attributes and adjectives to the weapons and armor, so some of the more unique equipment can really be powerful, but unless the player chooses to continue beating higher difficulty levels, then there really isn’t much need. There are a few unlockables that makes playing through a few times worthwhile, however.

Overall, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance was a solid title of it’s time. While not perfect by any means, the elements that were new to this style of game, and new to Baldur’s Gate in general really hold up, even now. While the shortage of characters and light playtime may be a little disappointing, this game is still a great title for the PS2 that adds some action RPG elements to it’s grandiose library.