Yeah it is okay. I only played it this year for the first time, although I bought it a year earlier. The encounters are indeed hard, I was rather surprised at some engagements. I missed out on a lot of stuff, because I did not make use of the new companions a lot and generally tend to play with the ones that are available from the get-go. So I can not really comment on that, but there were some intriguing characters for sure. The antagonist was also nice, although the "villain with a point"-trope has been a bit overused lately, and I think the redemption was not entirely necessary.
It did make BG2 a fair bit easier, though, definitely and it was much more linear than BG2, something that I do not really enjoy, I like my central operation base and then work from there, but no game-breaker.
It was poorly received by players when it came out, mostly because players wanted a game as good as BG2, which naturally was too hard to achieve. Also PoE did that a year earlier so that was a recent standard. The biggest outrage though on the net was because it had a companion that told her story and part of it was being raised as a girl then turned man (or the other way around?). At first I thought that was unnecessary, too, but did not put much more thought into it. Then I played it, and it literally is one sentence within the first two hours of the game. It comes up, because Corwyn has a child and the child has a father, too, I think? Other than that it is not talked about really. To be honest it gave the rather bland character some depth and purpose. Anyway, it was unbelievably ridiculous to rage about it.
All in all, I say it was solid. Bought it for ten bucks, gave quite good additions to BG2, enhanced the storyline (although they did not reference it in BG2, due to timing, which feels somewhat odd), linear gameplay, decent characters.
