Wargizmo

This game is what NWN2 should have been. Gone are the game breaking bugs, the ridiculously complicated crafting system, the horribly imbalanced melee weapons, the dozens of companions you have to micromanage. Basically they've either streamlined or taken out almost everything that made the game tedious or unfun. You now create your party at the start of the game, and those are your guys for the rest of the game, you tailor them to play however you want. You can pick up cohorts but they're not essential to the plot and they don't level up unless they're in the party, so you no longer have 12 guys you have to micromanage every time you get a new level. The combat system is much better, entering an area you're usually attacked right away so you have to actually make strategic decisions about what spells to cast in the short time you have before the enemy is on you. It's no longer a question of just buff yourself up for 5 minutes and then run around with your +8 sword chopping everything to pieces, you know what enemies you're facing and it's up to you to work out the best strategy to beat them. The overland map system is really fun, and actually makes all those rogue skills, which were virtually useuless in the main campaign, have a use now. Having said that, it's not all great. The plot is pretty non existent (although for me, 99% of video game plots are a total bore so I wasn't so bothered by that, better to have a token minimal plot that a massive but horrible one). There's also a very clear best way to build your party, and if you don't have prior knowledge of the overland map system you'll almost certainly find yourself re-rolling after the first couple of hours if you happened to build your party wrong. That said, if you take a half an hour to read up on the overland map system and maybe a party creation guide before jumping in, you'll almost certainly be able to make the party you want and have a whale of a time. One thing I really liked about this is the new dialogue system; all four of your guys now participate in the chat, and different dialogue options are available to different types of characters. Your wise character can interject with nuggets of wisdom, your charismatic characters can flirt with the NPCs or flatter them, your evil characters can throw around insults. This all helps you build up the rich personalities of the party you created and you genuinely become attached to your guys in a way the annoying companions in the original campaign couldn't have hoped to achieve. They're YOUR guys that YOU made and their personality is a combination of all their skills, stats, race and alignment.

Even after 5+ years since its release this game still has so many bugs and glitches it takes away from the overall experience. In my first playthrough I encountered 2 game breaking bugs (one where I had to load from an old save to progress, another where I had to use the console to spawn a particular npc); as well as dozens of small glitches, AI glitches, graphical glitches, quest glitches. The story and characters are decent enough but this game was clearly not put through enough QA and is essentially a beta build. As to gameplay, there are some fundamental flaws with the D&D engine that take away from the fun, for example the massive length of time it takes to buff your characters and the needlessly complex character statistics and crafting system. Yes, the game can be really fun but you have to really work for it. For every awesome battle or story arc there is just as much time spent micromanaging inventory and sitting there waiting for buffs to cast. As far as plot goes, some of the characters and store were really well done, but the writing is VERY inconsistent and more than one occasion some of the characters said something that literally made me cringe. At one point a character makes a fart joke and then EXPLAINS the fart joke (apparently the devs thought it was too subtle) and then is lauded by two of the other characters for her wit; also while we're on the subject of writing, can with stop using the phrase "could care less", it's supposed to be "couldn't care less", this was used at least 3 times in the campaign. There is the core **** game here somewhere, and if you have the patience and don't mind using the console occasionally then it's worth putting some time into, but there are MUCH better games you should look at first. If you haven't played the first NWN or Dragonage then you're better off checking those games out first.

I bought this game last night, was able to log in for about 5 minutes then **** went down. Tried again this morning and bnet was down again. No offline single player + crappy servers mean this game gets a big fat 0 for being totally unplayable.

Good story and great humour and personality, really enjoyable from start to finish. It's quite short, but it's not a full price game so that's okay I guess. If I had to find a flaw it's that the puzzles could have used a little more variety; there's quite a lot of repetition involved and many of the puzzles just involve using the same handful of tactics in a different combination of ways. As a result the puzzles are kind of easy except for the first couple of times you encounter a new environmental feature and have to figure out how to utilize it. Nitpicking aside though this is a fantastic game and there's nothing I can really say that others haven't already. Definitely worth it.

Amazed at all these butthurt fanboys giving this a 4 or below when it's clearly not a horrible game. No, it doesn't have nearly the depth of the first one, but on the other hand the combat feels greatly improved and the general interface, skill trees, inventory system and companion AI are extremely well thought out and eliminate a lot of the boringness that tends to go along with so many RPGs, such as wasting time on inventory management or babysitting every companion so they actually do what they're supposed to in battle. The story and character development aren't quite as gripping as the original, but it's still 100 times better than what you would get in most games. I found the game challenging on hard, without being frustratingly difficult - most difficult encounters can be figured out after a couple of tries. The worst thing about the game is probably the recycling of all the environments; the game could have used a few more templates for cave and dungeon design, or better yet use a Diablo style dungeon generator. The other bad thing is, because the game progresses more over time than over game area it feels much less epic than the original, you seem to have a lot less of a world to explore so to speak, and the cities and towns feel a lot more generic, and hence have much less atmosphere. E.g. the difference between the mage, dwarf and elven areas in the original was huge, whereas in DA2 all the town areas kind of look alike, apart form the general difference between rich and poor areas. I appreciate the game might have been worse on release than it is now, since I'm currently playing on the 1.03 patch and haven't experienced any real quest bugs, glitches or crashes yet. To sum up, this is a solid RPG that's worth playing, especially if you're into more tactics/combat based RPGs. It's not as good as the first one but it's definitely worth more than a score of 3 or 4.

The horrible controls, awful minion AI and lack of an in game map make this game way more frustrating than fun, which is a shame because there's tons of personality and humour in here. I guess I should stop buying console ports because they're rarely done well.

Great game, played through the campaign twice now and would play again, the plot is fairly linear but the great characters, voice acting, gameplay and upgrade system more than make up for it. The multiplayer is extremely well polished with leagues and ladders and it's really easy to find a game. Then there are all the custom mods which add thousands more hours of gameplay. If I had to find a flaw with the game it would be that some of the multiplayer features from other Blizzard RTS titles seem to have disappeared in this game, for example clan support and automated tournaments... The only people I would not recommend this game to are those who absolutely hate real time strategy games no matter what, for everyone else it's a no brainer, play it.

Great game, extremely immersive and addictive. The gameplay is really fun, and character customization is just about right. My only gripe is the game kind of forces you to go either full paragon or full renegade, as going half/half will hurt your character's ability to resolve in-game disputes both in quests and amongst your crew. This essentially removes a lot of choice the player has over how his character reacts to different situations in game and takes a way a huge part of what makes a roleplaying game fun. Other than that one issue though I thoroughly enjoyed this game and look forward to playing number 3!

Bought this on special from Steam, the graphics are really good, and the atmosphere and immersion are unreal, but unfortunately the otherwise decent gameplay is let let down by awkward controls as a result of a fairly average console port. My other major gripe is the game mechanic of using the same resource for upgrades as you use for health and ammo, since every time you play out an engagement less than perfectly it pretty much gimps your character for the future, and with the clunky controls this happens quite a bit. Add to this the fact that the savepoints are fairly far apart and it can make for a very frustrating experience. I'm just over halfway through it and the story seems very clichà and unoriginal so far. If you've already played through any of the Doom or Half Life series (or a dozen other games for that matter) there's nothing really new or interesting that this offers story wise. If you see this on special for XBOX or PS3 it might be worth a look at but I wouldn't recommend it for PC.