Gameplay 9/10

Baldur's Gate 3 excels in gameplay depth and customization, offering nearly limitless possibilities when building your character. The player has extensive choices of races, classes, subclasses, and unique skills that dramatically influence how the game unfolds. The exploration aspect is incredibly engaging, filled with environments that are brimming with hidden treasures, challenging puzzles, and side quests. These quests are far from trivial, often contributing significantly to the main narrative and offering unique rewards. NPC interactions are particularly impressive, responding realistically and dynamically to your decisions which completely immerses you into the world. Combat is strategic and highly rewarding, always demanding careful planning and clever tactics, making each encounter satisfying.

Story 9/10

The game features an extensive and deeply layered story that feels dynamic and genuinely responsive to your decisions. The choices players make throughout the game can dramatically alter the world's landscape, affecting not just your character but entire communities and regions. Each of your companions is exceptionally well-developed, bringing distinct personalities, backgrounds, and motivations into the journey. Interactions with these companions aren't superficial; your relationships influence major plot points, creating emotional stakes that make the story profoundly compelling. Clever, humorous dialogue keeps interactions fresh and engaging, easily hooking players and keeping them invested throughout the lengthy adventure.

Graphics 8/10

Baldur’s Gate 3 is visually stunning, with impressively detailed and varied environments. Locations range from enchanting forests and eerie ruins to bustling urban areas teeming with life and activity. Character designs are extremely realistic and detailed, supported by smooth animations and expressive facial features that make interactions natural and believable. Special attention is given to dynamic lighting effects, shadows, and atmospheric conditions like fog and weather creating immersive realism that invites exploration. Every corner of the world feels crafted with care, enhancing the overall gaming experience.

Sound & Music 9/10

You are greeted with an exceptional audio experience throughout the game, highlighted by top-tier voice acting that breathes life into each character. The delivery feels genuine and emotionally charged, providing the player with immersion and investment in the narrative. The game's combat sounds—from weapons clashing to spells exploding—are weighty and impactful. Ambient sounds further enrich the environment, giving every location its own distinctive feel. While the game's musical score is beautifully composed and dramatically fitting, occasional repetition can slightly reduce its impact over prolonged play.

Controls 8/10

Controls in Baldur's Gate 3 are responsive and easy to grasp, facilitating smooth and enjoyable gameplay. Basic actions like navigating menus, selecting skills, and engaging in combat feel seamless and user-friendly. Early on, inventory management, especially on console versions, posed some issues with cumbersome navigation and sorting. Fortunately, significant improvements through updates have streamlined the system, enhancing the user experience considerably and making item management intuitive and efficient.

Replayability 10/10

Baldur’s Gate 3 shines exceptionally in replayability, offering vast variety through its extensive journey. With twelve core classes, numerous subclasses, multiple races, and a variety of impactful story decisions, each playthrough can lead to entirely new adventures. The depth of companion interactions and alternate quest outcomes motivates repeated plays, ensuring fresh experiences every time. Given that a single playthrough can span from 75 to 100 hours, the game provides near-endless content, strongly encouraging exploration of alternate paths and playstyles.

Character Creation 9/10

Character creation in Baldur's Gate 3 is impressively robust and deeply enjoyable. The game offers extensive opportunities to tailor every aspect of your character. Players can choose from a wide range of races, classes, backgrounds, skills, and visual details to craft unique, personalized heroes. This in-depth customization encourages creativity, allowing players to experiment and create meaningful connections to their characters. Such personalization makes every decision feel significant and personal throughout the game.

Final Verdict 10/10

Baldur’s Gate 3 stands out as one of the most remarkable RPGs of its time by blending immersive gameplay, deeply engaging storytelling, and polished production values into one complete package. Despite its initial complexity, players are quickly rewarded as they dive deeper into its compelling narrative and intricate mechanics. The game masterfully balances accessibility for newcomers with a depth that satisfies even the most experienced RPG players. Its character customization is impressive, the combat is both tactical and thrilling, and the storytelling is consistently gripping and emotionally impactful. The remarkable replay value, driven by branching narratives and extensive character choices, ensures that players can continually find new content and reasons to return. Whether you're a long-time fan of role-playing games or simply someone looking to lose yourself in a deep fantasy adventure, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers a truly outstanding experience that stands among the best games ever.

Our Takes

Tommy's Take

Ok I know this won't be the most popular take and probably need to give this game another shot when I have a lot more time, but honestly, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 felt like signing up for a second job—one that doesn't even pay. Sure, the fantasy setting and fancy graphics might rope you in, but soon enough you realize you're stuck navigating menus that feel like a puzzle designed by a committee who secretly hates gamers. Picking spells, sorting inventory, and managing character sheets feels about as fun as doing your taxes.

Combat is theoretically tactical and strategic, but mostly it's just exhausting. Every fight is a marathon of button pressing, scrolling around the screen to select the right companion or character, and double-checking your character’s skills, hoping you're not accidentally wasting your turn on some useless spell you forgot you picked hours ago.

Let's not even talk about the difficulty spikes. One minute you're casually exploring, and suddenly the game decides you're overdue for punishment, sending enemies after you that hit harder than Mike Tyson in his prime.

Then there's the story, which yes, has depth but frankly, too much of it. Conversations feel endless, and keeping track of a hundred side-quests, companions, and subplots is more stressful than entertaining. It's like trying to binge-watch three seasons of a complicated TV series in one sitting; eventually, you just start skipping scenes because who has time for all that?

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn't necessarily bad, there's clearly a quality game here, somewhere beneath layers of complexity. But if you prefer your games fun and easy to play rather than a relentless grind that eats your free time, this might be one adventure worth avoiding.

More From Doc

Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't one of the best games of 2023, it's one of the best games of all time. There's so many great things to say, it's hard to decide where to even start.

The story is cool, but where it really shines is how much it can vary. Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the few games that the more you put into it, the more the game rewards you with an even deeper experience. The character creation is as deep in visuals as just about any game out there, but it's their backgrounds, backstories, and skillsets that'll determine your strengths and weaknesses that greatly affect your play-through.

My first playthrough, I went with Gale, one of the pre-made characters and had a blast playing as the typical hero and trying to help my party members at every turn and see their storylines to the best possible resolution. It was great, but if I had known better- the ready-made characters like Gale and Shadowheart already have a backstory and quests that'll unfold anyway. Balder's Gate really shines letting you create your own story from scratch and be as good or evil as you want to be.

Because I wasn't at all familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, for my second playthrough, I spent a lot of time researching the attributes, classes, etc. in character creation to create a Pirate/Assassin type of character. He could steal, talk his way out of sticky situations, and offer decent support in fights. No way could he stand toe-to-toe with a brawler and stay alive very long, but using elevated locations and shadows, he could be a powerful weapon in combat.

The best part about Balder's Gate 3 is how just about every choice you make with just about every character in the game is remembered and can make a REAL impact on the outcome. Dismiss an annoying NPC? Might be fine... or it might accidentally lead to their death causing his whole group to hate you making your path down the road all the more difficult. The game mechanics made my morally ambiguous and selfish swashbuckler a joy on the second run. I saw so many different reactions from the NPC's, my party, and new cutscenes... and this was still a long ways away from running a truly "Evil" character campaign.

The downside to this game is the counter point from the depth & detail making it great - it is a LOT to digest. Everything is deep and flushed out to the Nth degree, but that also makes it all the more difficult to grasp and get used to. If you're casual gamer or simply playing sporadically, coming back days or weeks later and trying to remember all the who's, what's, and where's could be overwhelming.

Baldur's Gate does turn-based strategy extremely well, but if you've got a fight with 15, 25, or 50 combatants, just getting through one round of turns can take what feels like forever. I was into it- it's fair and extremely rewarding, but I can totally understand how players who only have 30-45 minute windows to play can find it overwhelming, complicated, or too granular. Playing on the easier game settings can negate a lot of this frustration, but I understand how more casual gamers might prefer a happy medium. In contrast, Space Marine 2 has a good story... but it also doesn't matter all that much- you're gonna have fun blasting your way through it either way. With Balder's Gate 3, the story, dialogue choices, and your decisions are as important as the gameplay.

The replay-ability and value for Baldur's Gate 3 are as good as it gets. One campaign can easily take upwards of 80 hours if you complete most of the side quests. I finished my 3rd campaign as an evil "Dark Urge" character six months ago and already, I'm starting to get the itch for another go. Even at the full $70 price on PS5, developer Larian Studios deserves a ton of credit for not only adding new, free content through numerous patches since release, but for being committed to leaving micro-transactions, pay-to-win mechanics, and pay $5 for "extra" cool colored boots shenanigans out of the game.

If Zelda, Final Fantasy, the Witcher, or the Fallout series are among your favorite games of all-time, you owe it to yourself to play Baldur's Gate 3.

Screenshots

Captured on PS5