Only a few forgivable problems mar the surface. While battles are now larger, set-piece affairs that are much weightier than anything encountered in the original, they are also often artificial. Each quest features at least one, if not two or three, of these showdowns. Enemies are either perfectly positioned for combat as soon as you enter the room, or the surrounding terrain or furniture conspires to make things much more difficult than they should have been. It seems like you're constantly walking into ambushes. This eventually forces you to cheat, as many of these battles simply cannot be won during your first run-through. You'll need to die once to determine where the foes are, twice to experiment with different tactics, and sometimes thrice to experiment with different “buff” spells before entering the room with the baddies. This means that you'll eventually be prepping your characters prior to battles that they shouldn't know about. That's poor game design.

Pathfinding is still atrocious. Characters will often bump into one another and then split up when deploying for battle. Combat micro-management is still a necessity for those who want to avoid constantly reloading saved games. The environment isn't as interactive as it should be. Hit and miss is the operative phrase here—at one location you might be able to click on a number of interesting statues and read descriptions, while in another you're left to stare and wonder at something as glaring as a line of impaled corpses. Too much time is spent managing your inventories (including the scavenging of bodies and the subsequent buying and selling) and walking from place to place. Party members move faster now, but the pace of the adventure still drags on occasion.

Despite these shortcomings, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is a glorious experience for anyone who ever rolled an eight-sided die (or wanted to, but was afraid to be seen with the role-playing crowd back in high school). It's a long game that requires a lot of the player in terms of time and devotion, but rarely has such a commitment been so richly rewarded.

Brett Todd
Contributing Editor