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The only people who hate this game are people with no friends. It’s a blast with some buddies. The random elements can be a bit brutal and the AI cheats, but that just gives you and your bud(s) extra motivation to beat the crap out of the bots before each other. Really my only critique is that tying all of the character unlock progression to the single player mode is absurd and very against the spirit of a party game.

Superhot is a fairly fresh take on the over-done first-person shooter genre. Time moves at a glacial pace until you move, making for some gun-play that's more tactical than hectic. The gameplay is exhilarating in its own way. It's a good formula, but too repetitive to be completely addicting. I do have a couple of criticisms of Superhot. First is the story mode. The initial campaign you must play through to unlock the Endless and Challenge modes is mercifully short, yet still annoying. Some might enjoy the odd presentation, I suppose, but I found the plot to be a chore. It never grabbed me, and I felt Superhot's apparent tongue-in-cheek order to recommend the game to others wasn't as charming as they might've thought. The other glaring issue with Superhot is the unrealistic body movement of the enemies. The unfortunate reality is if this problem were fixed, the game would be way too easy. Enemies make drastic, unrealistic and sudden contortions that make reading body movement as an indicator of where to aim your shots a highly unreliable prospect. Other than these complaints, Superhot is an enjoyable game at its core.

Bottom line: Good improvement/stabilization. Multiplayer actually works decently. Mediocre additions. Reasonable price. Beamdog is effective but slow, and a bit sloppy. Improvements/stabilization: Beamdog worked hard to make BGII run properly on new machines, and in general, just work a whole lot better without performance varying overly much between different computers. They crushed a whole lot of bugs, and introduced some new ones. Not unexpected. They have done a fine job of squashing new bugs, and in general I've found BGII:EE to contain minimal bugs. BG:EE had a horrible number of bugs on release, but thankfully as they are on the same engine, nearly all of the bug fixes that they worked on for the past year in BG:EE carry over to BGII:EE. Multiplayer works decently: Deal breaker. Baldur's Gate seems a perfect match for multiplayer, but in the original games it was incredibly buggy and prone to stop working at any given moment. Not only have they fixed most of the bugs with multiplayer, they also gave us a matchmaking feature so we don't have to manually hand out our IP addresses to people. That said, it's worth noting that they promised a matchmaking feature over a year ago, initially stating it would be in BG:EE upon release. They only recently got it working a few weeks ago. If you're jumping in now, then huzzah. But it's worth noting how slow these guys are. Mediocre additions: The areas in BGII:EE look great and pretty true-to-the-original, which is excellent since the new environments looked very much out of place in BG:EE. I find the characters very disappointing, however. While Baldur's Gate always blended the world of the Forgotten Realms with the rhetoric of today somewhat, Neera goes over the line. She very much feels like apart of our world and seems out of place in the Forgotten Realms setting. That said I do enjoy her personality, but it's worth noting she's terribly Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately her voice acting seems uninspired, this time around. While she sounded very bubbly in BG:EE she sounds a little bored in BGII:EE. I'm not sure why. Hexxat is game-breaking, a complete box of contradictions, basically existing purely to throw Evil Partiers a bone. Oh, and probably to convince iPad users (who will have to download the characters as DLC) to buy her once they Google her stats. She feels very much like one of the NPC add-ons that a modder added to the game, not like she was written by a professional. Dorn stands as wasted potential; what could've been an incredibly interesting character is just a flat, one-dimensional character instead. According to his stats he has a 15 Wisdom, which is fairly high, and yet from his actions and words he seems to be one of the least wise characters in the game. Game director Trent Oster bragged that he was an "unapologetically evil" character, and I'm sad to say that he was quite right. Dorn has absolutely no conscience, not semblance of honor or restraint in any situation. Not only is that gratuitous, but it is also bad characterization, boring, totally inhuman and unrealistic. I had high hopes for Dorn, perhaps too high. It would seem though that Beamdog is incapable of analyzing human nature and understanding the existence of evil, and as such, they will never be able to write a realistic and relatable evil character. A shame. If you have never played BGII before, I would say to instead seek out Viconia, Edwin, and a certain Throne of Bhaal exclusive NPC if you wish to witness genuinely interesting evil characters. Indeed, it would seem that the Sun Soul Monk Rasaad is the only character who actually fits in to the established universe in Baldur's Gate II. Reasonable price: The only people saying that the price is unreasonable is those that already own Baldur's Gate II. Yeah, of course you think it's overpriced at that point; all you're looking at in that case is an upgrade. For those who have never played however, $25 is a steal. Since there is no real way of deciphering between those who own the original and those who do not, it is $25 for us all. Besides, Beamdog needs the money so that they can expand and perhaps stop doing such slow and somewhat sloppy work.