Baldur's Gate III is one of those games that I'm really not sure what to talk about when reviewing it. You can tell that this game was a long time in the making, it has a big focus on interactivity and choices which makes things feel more involved in a cool way. My time with this game was a little odd; I got the game when it first fully released and I planned on finishing a solo playthrough, but I got caught up in several multiplayer playthroughs which severely slowed down my progress. Eventually I just said "screw it" and I completed it in multiplayer mode with my brother in a fresh new playthrough. I ended with 203 hours and I really felt drained near the end of my time with the game, taking a few breaks and whatnot.

I guess I'll start with some complaints I have about the game, from minor to major. While BG3 is a solid game overall and a complete game with no microtransactions or DLC, it is not without its flaws, and frankly its annoying that people are acting like this game is flawless. Granted, I saw a lot more people defending it from any criticism when it first released; nowadays I find people are more reasonable with critique. The game has crashed on me and my brother several times in multiplayer, plus a few more times in my separate solo playthrough. As far as we knew, these were not issues with our computers or Wi-Fi connections, its just the game bugging out. It gets even worse in Act III, where whenever you go to Baldur's Gate itself the game needs to load the world around you for a long while. Another annoying bug involved the game not recognizing our gold, so even though we had thousands of gold it treated us like we had either none or, in my case, the same amount as a different party member (interestingly this method did not work for the other player). An additional bug only kicked in during Act III, but was also very annoying because it got in the way of doing dialogue naturally; sometimes the game only gives you the option to say "Continue" when there were actually meant to be dialogue options available. Similarly, sometimes the game doesn't recognize you're using certain items: for me, this happened with a hat that was supposed to give you one extra Wild Shape charge (that hat would proceed to almost never work for me until the very end), and one case where it wasn't recognizing a quest item we needed for opening doors. There's also some really minor and even funny bugs we stumbled across, like dead bodies glitching out or characters occasionally loading in a t-pose. One minor glitch that was more annoying than funny was the fact that sometimes the game seems to need to process an enemy's turn, so the enemy will just stand there doing nothing for a good while. This happens a lot more in encounters with a bunch of enemies and it gets irritating real fast, though I noticed this was smoothed over mostly in my time with Act III (possibly fixed by recent patches). Needless to say, unless all these issues were somehow just on my end, this isn't the perfectly polished flawless game some people treat it as, and I'm glad it is continuing to get major bug fix patches even if I think this stuff should've been fixed on release.

With all that stuff out the way, I'll cover the gameplay itself. It takes a lot from the 5e D&D system, to the point you could probably pretty much consider it a video game form of it (aside from some rules that are different here than on the tabletop but I feel that's pretty inevitable). I never really felt like I was strategizing a lot, but the combat was always pretty fun, especially for spellcasters since you get many cool spells to toy around with. You really feel that sense of getting stronger with every level and there's a good amount of tools to mess around with. Don't like your class? Picked a Feat you thought you'd like but ended up not doing anything for you? Respecs are dirt cheap, so you can set yourself back at Level 1 to change your class and relevel again no problem. I was pretty satisfied just being a Warlock in my one playthrough I actually beat the game in, so I didn't feel the need to, but people will get a lot out of this being so accessible. I think the only thing that's a bit annoying about the combat is the camera; it can be pretty odd to finagle with at times. Sometimes an enemy seems untargetable, but you just need to fiddle around with the targeting system a bit to actually hit the enemy or get the perfect angle to just barely have enough space to snipe them. The game does try to encourage using the environment to your advantage, as well: if an enemy is on a scaffolding, you can destroy the scaffolding and knock them down, for instance. Some status effects in the world have interactions with spells, like how you can ignite webs or oil with fire spells and electrocute anywhere where there's water. The combat can be quite in-depth if you really want to, but it doesn't punish people who prefer to play more simply like I do. Still, though, if you don't have a grasp on how D&D (5e) works, you might have a hard time getting adjusted to this game. This isn't essentially a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler like the Dark Alliance games are.

The story...I don't know if I should even try to cover it considering how many different outcomes you can get in certain scenarios. For instance, my brother was playing the Dark Urge character, so he had very different interactions than I would've had, plus a really unique role in the story itself. Of course, the main plot is mostly the same as far as I can tell. The game is split into Acts: Act I, Act II, and Act III. Each can be quite long, especially if you try to do as much side content as you can, so I certainly never felt starved for content. Act I mostly involves the Tieflings and Druids; the Tieflings have settled into a Druid owned area and the Druids don't like that because the area is sacred. You can also choose whether you want to go kill the goblins (pretty much the good route) or side with the goblins (evil route since they want to go kill everyone in the Druid grove). I'm not gonna summarize every act, but each has a lot of side goals alongside the main quest. The story was pretty cool to experience in my opinion. There's a lot of cool twists and turns, which unfortunately I cannot say most of to prevent spoiling things...and to prevent this review being even longer than it already is.

One thing I want to praise about this game is that I'm really impressed with the special focus put into the characters. They aren't really super unique characters by themselves, but all the attention put into characterizing them is cool. They have their own subplots to take care of, some even relating heavily to the main story, and they're all compelling enough to follow. Probably the coolest part in my opinion is the facial animations. I don't know what they did to pull this off but each character just emotes so differently from the others. Gale's always got a smug look on his face, Shadowheart is very sassy and has these weird head tilts she likes to do, Astarion has a very over the top personality and his face shows it...it just works well to make these characters feel more real and personable.

Overall, despite my grievances with the game's hiccups, I really enjoyed my time with Baldur's Gate 3. It's a fun experience and I can definitely see why people want it to win GOTY, even if its not my personal candidate for it. Solid 4 stars from me.