Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Review

The folks at RPGWatch have published their own review of Siege of Dragonspear, Beamdog’s new expansion for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition that bridges the gap between the two classic role-playing games from BioWare.

It’s a positive review overall, as evidenced by the 4/5 score, though the writer complains about the game’s linearity, the uneven writing, and a number of bugs that are especially prominent during multiplayer. Here are the reviewers’ conclusions:

When Baldur’s Gate 2 came out, I was a poor newlywed student, so I waited to buy it until the gold edition came out. After being blown away by Shadow of Amn, I immediately wanted to continue my adventures and play Throne of Bhaal. Back then I was disappointed. For me, Throne of Bhaal had a predictable story, worse characters, and felt terribly linear. I replayed it for the first time about three years ago and really enjoyed it. That’s how expectations go. I had absolutely no expectations for Siege of Dragonspear. Quite honestly I expected Beamdog to completely fail. Perhaps that explains why I enjoyed the game as much as I did. I think if it wasn’t a Baldur’s Gate game, but the first effort from a small team, we’d all be discussing what a surprisingly good CRPG it is. But it is a Baldur’s Gate game. Beamdog didn’t have to create the mechanics, combat, monsters, or even most of the NPCs. I even think they went a little too far in trying to anchor it between Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and personally would have been happier with fewer cameo appearances by characters from the main games. I’d like to note now that my 4 star rating includes both the new material as well as the old engine, which Beamdog had nothing to do with. I personally can’t separate the two, because without the Infinity Engine, there would simply be no game. As a Baldur’s Gate game, Siege of Dragonspear is about as good as a lot of the Infinity Engine expansions such as Tales of the Sword Coast, Heart of Winter, or Throne of Bhaal. That is to say, noticeably inferior to either Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2. Nevertheless, Beamdog understood what made the Baldur’s Gate games fun and tried their best to implement it in this expansion. That they didn’t entirely succeed just goes to show why it’s so hard to make a great game. It’s also really hard for me to recommend this game per se, because there are quite honestly a lot of reasons that people have found to dislike it. If you can look past those, you’ll find an extremely solid retro RPG in Siege of Dragonspear.