Obligatory disclaimer before the attack dogs pounce: the following are strictly personal opinions. Dur.

I've trudged through act I, gone through act II, III and have emerged in act IV. (There isn’t much else to play. Where I’m at now doesn’t have much in way of games. The other choice is Dungeon Siege.) Thus far, I must profess to being distinctly unimpressed, and while the "it gets better after act I" claims are somewhat true, it's mostly because surely it cannot get any worse. BD is an adequate offering in light of the less-than-good RPGs released recently, but overall, it still is average at its best moments, and downright mediocre at worst. It has some good points, but the flaws overshadow most of them. About all I can say is, hey, at least the music is lovely.

Where to start?

Redundant fluff -- nowhere does the adage "less is more" seem more true. The damage/resistance types are utterly insane, and the fact that skillpoints need to be invested to gain greater proficiency with each damage type -- rather than weapon type, as should be done in any reasonable ruleset -- is even more ridiculous. Poison, fire, earth, water and air, yes. Bone, ethereal, spiritual and shadow? What’s the point? What is next, cold iron for the fey, silver for the were, wooden stakes for the vampires? It’s even more ridiculous than, say, D&D 3E. Cluttering up the screen with random numbers and objects do not substance make.

Voiceacting – there’s not much to say about this, except… perhaps next time expenses and time could be saved by foregoing this altogether? Now, like music, art and writing, voiceacting isn’t going to please everybody. However, there’s a difference between professional voiceacting and… I don’t know what this is. It sounds like random people picked off the streets, forced to do the voices at a very low salary. (I tried to look up the voiceactors in the credits, and nothing relevant came up, either – no professional credits, no nothing. I dread to draw conclusions.) Incidentally, I’ve played a NWN mod (Elegia Eternum) and a BG2 mod (Kelsey) with better voiceacting, and those people are confirmed amateurs who aren’t even paid.

Battlefield -- good in conception, horrendous in execution. Bad level design, levels that go on and on and on repetitively. Oh, mustn't forget the plentiful bugs. The map that goes black for no reason, even though the area's already explored. Empty levels. Quest items/monsters that fail to appear. Monsters that get eternally stuck in the black space of limbo, unreachable by the player character. What, are these undocumented features? Not that there is much of a documentation to start with, which brings me to the next gripe.

Documentation -- more accurately, the lack thereof. The skill descriptions leave much to be desired, and that's being generous. The charms have no descriptions at all. Excuse me, but I don't want to take the trial-and-error approach and reloading over and over just to test items and skills. Even if these details are not in the manual, at least they should be in the game.

Things that make sod-all sense -- take, for instance, the quest General Bran gives you. I got the quest, and talked to the merchant (with dialogue options limited to "Let's trade" and "I want to rest"), then got back to General Bran and got the option to -- for some unfathomable reason -- tell him that the merchant has confessed to financial perfidy. I'm sorry, I fail to see how "Let's trade" and "I want to rest" constitute an interrogation. Oh, and the cute little animals in the wilderness? Click on one, and you'll have to commit genocide upon its species for the rest of the act. Wow, do all the animals share a hive mind or something? Hellooo, logic?

Polish -- polish? What polish? Some things still appear as "Object 04895" or such; some items don't even match their descriptions (such as rings being labeled "spears" or a club being labeled "scythe"). Typos and grammatical errors crop up here and there in the dialogue. Bugs (lockpicking, quests, etc). Bad pathfinding (which lessens any appeal the party system might have) that seems to be worse than that of BG1, and that game’s how many years old?

Repetition -- please, no more levers. Lever puzzles are neither clever nor fun. Surely there are other ways to secure doorways? Anything but levers, for the love of all that is holy and unholy!

Aesthetics -- this is more subjective than the rest. I think the characters’ animations are rather jerky, and their models often disproportionate. (My character’s feet are almost Hobbit-like. Hur hur. No hair, though. Shame.) The weapons appear oversized, and it’s a marvel my character can carry them at all, never mind wield them in combat. The result is interesting: absolutely cartoonish characters set against a gritty, dark gamescape. Not sure what effect the artists were going for. The writing overall is so-so, though some of the DK’s lines are cute. However, there are bits that approach being Engrish and there are bits that try too hard to be “high fantasy” and end up pretentious. The plot isn’t very compelling; I don’t feel any incentive to get from point A to point B. The storytelling plods along like a dying turtle through quicksand. But that’s okay, I guess; I didn’t expect much from this department, anyway. Good thing about low expectations is you don’t get disappointed easily.