Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition Review
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The new character added to the mix is Hexxat, an evil-aligned female thief. Personally, I found her to be much more interesting and better-written than the other three. There's actually a pretty entertaining and well-guarded twist on her character that is revealed during her storyline, and it's nice to have an evil-aligned character who isn't a bloodthirsty lunatic, insane necromancer or self-centered jerk. While I always felt going good was a natural choice in Baldur's Gate II, with a character like Hexxat the argument for following an evil alignment is a bit more compelling.
As for their quests and stories themselves, after playing through all of them, I have to say that it's still something of a mixed bag, but overall the new content is a step up from the drab and uninteresting stuff found in the first game's Enhanced Edition. For starters, instead of one or two new rather humdrum and short areas added to the map, now each character has about double that number, and all of them feature more elaborate questlines. While still linear, the gameplay they offer is a lot stronger, often featuring more side-quests and multiple quest solutions (like hiring on allies to help with a tough fight, talking your way out of one, and so on). This is good stuff, and while not all quests are that interesting, the mere fact that even few are is still welcome.
When it comes to combat, much of the encounter design has been radically improved over the first game's re-release, and the challenge level has been upped significantly. It feels weird to say, but some of the most enjoyable, tactically demanding fights I had while playing through Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition were actually from the brand-new areas and quests. This is in stark contrast to the added combat in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, which was pitifully easy and just plain boring, with few real tactics required, so Beamdog have most definitely improved here.
I did say above that the new content is still a mixed bag, and there are definitely gripes to make. For example, Hexxat's character, while a worthy addition to the game, occupies probably the most dull of all the character storylines, and after her little twist there isn't much to keep up interest. Some of the side-quests are also rather weak - ones associated with Neera's story in particular, including hunting down stray cats in a forest, and searching crates for a little girl's lost brooch, are pretty much blatant filler, and aren't any more fun than they sound on paper.
I also feel that Beamdog's team lacks some of the class and charm in the writing department compared to millennium-era BioWare. I found that sometimes the tone and consistency was all over the place - lots of fourth-wall-breaking comments, strange anachronisms, humor awkwardly juxtaposed with more serious events, and so on. And, frankly, I despise Neera, whose character is not much more than a blatant Manic Pixie Dream Girl fan-service stereotype, and half of whose lines seem were written with the intent of starting new "go for the eyes!"-esque memes. It's not that the writing is bad, in fact, far from it, but it often doesn't fit with the original content as well as it should.
Last, it's worth noting that as far as presentation goes, the new content is once again a step up from Beamdog's previous work. The newly-designed areas are all sharper and more detailed than before, and the overall area design is more varied and elaborate to explore and examine. There's also a bit more variety in the voice acting, and far more lines are voiced than the last time around, perhaps a testament to a larger budget and more time spent in development.
There are, however, some odd rough edges - for example, I found an animated waterfall in one new area that was exceptionally low-resolution and ugly next to the terrain, and there are some pretty blurry textures seen from time to time despite the backgrounds being pre-rendered, making these new areas still stand out from the original game's. These issues aren't just visual too: in one area, I discovered several distinct characters within spitting distance of each other which were all obviously voiced by the same actress, with a few really phony accents to try to cover that up.
