Peter Carter

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As good a start as you could reasonably expect at this point, but falls short of the promise of the early demos. The 3D system is either underplayed in the initial sections or not as powerful as made out, with the Z-axis barely more present than in titles like X-Com, which never hyped this feature to the same degree. It's also not clear how much the glitchy animations and other graphical oddities will be cleaned up by the time the final game is out. Having said that there is also some great lighting direction and cut-scenes. The initial setup via the opening cinematic is strong (first segment after that is meh though) and there are *some* interesting aspects to the combat. This hampered by a fairly clunky UI e.g. it doesn't let you display the inventory and the equipment screen at the same time (??!?). I'm also not sure being able to shove everyone off everything and jump onto stuff is quite as great as it initially seems: it's likely to get old fairly quickly and lacks the wow value of the initial environment system in DoS/DoS 2, particularly if it's to be relied on throughout the entire game... This is exacerbated by the blatant lifts from DoS like being able to dip your weapon in fire etc, which only just makes sense (all fire is an oil fire? The poison is viscous enough to coat the blade and of the kind that has near-immediate effect? Every source just happens to have these qualities). Hopefully by the time this hits final release it will be as great as the hype made it seem, but something about this early offering -- technology aside -- just misses the depth and charm of Baldur's Gate when it was released. An oddity because it seemed to have so much charisma when demoed... The 'who do you dream of at night' extra section of character creation was pretty cool though. We shall see how this game evolves, but there's no smoking gun the final game will be worth the full high price just yet...