Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (Xbox)

[lymang]

I was at Gamestop on Friday, and the price of this game finally dropped to a reasonable level: 24.99. EBGames still wanted (even used!) more than that just the week before.

I'm about half way through the game (if the 4 chapter thing is correct) and I'm enjoying it pretty much. It's got some issues.. I'm playing Dorn the Barbarian and as far as combats go, he kicks serious, serious butt. On Normal difficulty he's not been challenged much (well, the few areas with Troglodytes have been difficult because of the acid/poison). I don't like the boss programming. Using Dorn, it's been easy - you take Dorn and charge the primary boss, ignoring all flunkies/scrubs, and with a few swings (dual wielding, originally one handed weapons, now two handed) the primary enemy goes down, and immediately all the flunkies/scrubs die. This seems silly to me. They need to take advantage of the damage that the boss did and try to take me out! Seems much more logical than them falling to pieces. Ulchalothe (spelling) did pretty massive damage to Dorn before he could reach it, but once he did, it was two swings (4 attacks) and the durn thing went down, and all of it's scrubs died.
Also, the item creation thing tries to be "mysterious" by not revealing what gems do what. This seems idiotic to me. Since you can save before doing it, it's easy enough to figure out exactly what each gem will do (buy it, test in the workshop, then restore if it's not the gem you want). That being the case, it's just stupid to keep it a mystery. Open it up and let the player know what's going on.

Clearly there was enough time between BGA and BGA2 that the programmers learned about the XBox. DA2 looks better than DA1, and there's a lot of little gui improvements (the map thing is better, and the interface for assigning spells/abilities to the trigger + buttons is quite nice).

All in all, a nice distraction so far till Fable comes out.

:-)

Lyman