Let me preface by saying this is my first CRPG. That being said, in terms of story, characters, roleplaying, and player freedom, Baldur's Gate 3 is an incredible feat of game design. The combat however, I do not vibe with. Perhaps it's because translating D&D combat into a video game is not especially intuitive or perhaps it's my relative uninteresting in D&D. Most of the time it feels cumbersome, tedious, and if I can avoid it through dialogue, I will do that 99% of the time. Giving me a plethora of spells, attacks, and options in combat quickly becomes overwhelming as the game doesn't really explain anything to you as if it expects you to be an expert in D&D or to just experiment with everything, a truly impossible feat. Even on the easiest difficulty, my wife and I would constantly get frustrated as enemies would do things so abruptly, we'd have no time to even register why we were suddenly almost dead or what a particular debuff was doing to our character - do they expect us to check out the D&D wiki mid combat? It really is a shame. I imagine if the combat were more engaging for me, Baldur's Gate 3 could have been an all-timer.

Regardless of these frustrations (which led to many a save scum), playing through BG3 with my wife in split-screen co-op (a feature I'm thankful was implemented, otherwise I probably would've skipped out on it entirely) has been an enjoyable and memorable one.