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Genre: Role Playing Game

Format: CD

Developer: BioWare

Mac Publisher: MacPlay

Minimum System Requirements: 266MHz G3, Mac OS 9.2 or Mac OS X v10.1.5, 256MB RAM, 56K modem or Local Area Network (LAN) for multiplayer, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

Review Computer: 1GHz Powerbook G4 12" 768MB RAM, 32MB GeForce FX Go 5200, and Mac OS X v10.3.3

Network Feature: Yes

Price: $29.99

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Availability: Now

Official Website: [url=http://www.bioware.com/games/throne_bhaal]http://www.bioware.com/games/throne_bhaal[/url]

Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!

This is typically what comes to mind when I think of Dungeons and Dragons- based role-playing games.

I think I have enough geek cred to review Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal; I've played most of Baldur's Gate (the beta, no less), beaten Baldur's Gate II, played Macintosh classics like Exile, Avernum, and Realmz, read a few of the Dragonlance novellas, even played in one or two tabletop games (I wanna cast Magic Missile!). However, I haven't exactly been keeping up on the latest and greatest—my last multiplayer online roleplaying game was Clan Lord during the free trial, and I never quite made it to Neverwinter Nights, so I jumped at the chance to get back into it when Kirk offered Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal (ToB), the (very) long-awaited expansion pack to Shadows of Amn.

To those of you unfamiliar with the story:

Baldur's Gate ended with the defeat of Sarevok, the mysterious evil burly-looking warrior with the wicked armor who killed your foster father, Gorion. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn puts you in the dungeon of evil wizard Jon Irenicus, who you spend the entire game tracking down and eventually whacking. Throughout the course of these two games, you discover that both Sarevok and Jon Irenicus as well as yourself and your childhood friend Imoen are Bhaalspawn, or children of the incredibly malevolent deity Bhaal. From here, Throne of Bhaal places you in a besieged city named Saradush, trapped between an invincible army of fire giants led by a Bhaalspawn named Yaga Shura and a crazed despot Bhaalspawn inside the city who Yaga Shura is after.

As with Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal allows you to either generate a brand new character at a level appropriate for beginning the adventure or import your own character from an old Baldur's Gate II save. Because of this, Throne of Bhaal will be as difficult as you make it; my Baldur's Gate II party hit the experience cap in BG2, so the first few dungeons were challenging, but not too challenging when you've got a level 20-plus monk, fighter/druid, two thief/mages, and two warriors in your party, all decked out with a load of great equipment. Those of you who aren't so lucky might want to spend a little more time leveling up your party in Shadows of Amn before taking on Throne of Bhaal; it's worth doing some of those side quests in the long run. You can also check out the new area added to the world map in Throne of Bhaal, Watcher's Keep, a rather long and arduous dungeon with plenty of good experience, loot, and no relevance whatsoever to the plot at hand.

For better or worse, Baldur's Gate II does a good job replicating the ideal Dungeons and Dragons game; the world is very open-ended, and you get plenty of chances to role-play your character by deciding between different choices that reflect on your alignment and your reputation. Given an encounter with refugees, you could choose to kill them or help them out, given an encounter with a potential bar fight, you could break it up or jump into the fray. How you respond in any given situation can affect the way your party interacts both with each other (be too good or too evil and some members will leave) and with the outside world (non-player characters will treat you differently). However, as fun as it is to test the different possible outcomes of an encounter, it doesn't create a very alluring plot at first; the initial segments of Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal feel very disconnected from your party and your character at first—Okay, so one minute I was whomping on an evil wizard, now I'm in a besieged city, what the heck just happened? Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, by comparison, didn't suffer from as much of a disconnected narrative because the game forced you to get out of the dungeon before worrying about things like that. Throne of Bhaal, unfortunately, has no such kick-in-the-ass for its plot, which makes it very easy to lose interest.

This, by itself, is not that serious of a problem; good games can have slow plots and still be worth playing. The character development engine, spawned from traditional AD&D rules, is incredibly deep and allows for character customization via class options, like dual-class and multi-class, loads of equipment, class-specific special abilities, new spells and a much higher experience cap. The combat engine plays more like WarCraft III than, say, Final Fantasy; you'll have to simultaneously juggle spells and skills for as many as six different characters while worrying about terrain, health, friendly fire, and, of course, the enemies. The immense variety of outcomes for any given quest alone makes Throne of Bhaal worth replaying over and over, especially since the game gives you access to every possible NPC from Shadows of Amn right from the beginning of the game. If any of these can sustain you long enough for the plot to get going, you might very well want to consider picking Throne of Bhaal up and giving it a whirl.

Unfortunately, slow plot build-up isn't ToB's only flaw. Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale, and Throne of Bhaal were all built on the Infinity Engine, a venerable role-playing game engine that is well-suited to the Dungeons and Dragons system because it handles multiple characters very easily, makes Dungeons and Dragons' turn-based combat system feel much more lively (almost real-time), and renders environments realistically enough for a modern role-playing game. However, it's old. Baldur's Gate looked impressive at the time because 3D graphics were still fairly crude; Baldur's Gate II started looking particularly dated, even with some impressive sprite animation; now, Throne of Bhaal arrives a few years late, and has to compete with the likes of Neverwinter Nights. Even game engines as old by the one shared by Fallout and Fallout 2 allow for animation much, much more smooth than the animations found in Throne of Bhaal. Furthermore, Throne of Bhaal can't make the game render more smoothly without speeding up the game itself, meaning that while one could force the game to render at 60 frames per second, doing so speeds up the actual game speed to twice the default speed, throwing you off sync in network games and forcing you to pause every three seconds in a battle to avoid making mistakes that kill off your party in just a few seconds.

ToB's age doesn't just show in the graphics and animation, though; the interface itself feels sluggish and clumsy. Navigating from the main screen to the various menus and sub-menus isn't nearly as responsive as it should be; mouse clicks take much longer to register than they do in the OS, and dragging and dropping items is exceptionally clumsy because one click can either register as a whole drag-and-drop or just the drag, which normally wouldn't be a problem, except the extreme mouse lag left me accidentally dragging-and-dropping a whole lot of items into random Bags of Holding or giving them to other characters when I just wanted to equip them or something. Besides this, six different screens is a little bit ridiculous; it would have behooved the engine designers to take a cue from Diablo II and utilize map overlays and dynamically resized game screens so that the player doesn't need to take such a jarring pause from the action. Finally, even simple tasks like managing multiple characters in-game is somewhat inconvenient; while the included BGConfig application lets you tweak hotkeys and other useful settings, it would have been much, much more convenient if basic RTS amenities like shift-queuing attack commands, or more apparent visual cues to see if your characters are in the middle of performing actions so you don't interrupt their spell casting by telling them to move elsewhere.

That said, anyone who already put up with the previous two Baldur's Gate titles won't have a problem with this. Frankly, if you've got the mental fortitude to log dozens of hours with this hopelessly dated engine, you're probably not going to have a problem dealing with a little bit of a wait while the plot picks up. If you liked Baldur's Gate II, you'll most likely enjoy Throne of Bhaal. However, don't expect any radical changes to the way the game plays; it's not quite what Lord of Destruction was to Diablo II or Brood War to StarCraft. It's more Baldur's Gate, nothing more, nothing less. Ultimately, I couldn't recommend Throne of Bhaal to anyone who couldn't bring themselves to finish Baldur's Gate II. For those of you who liked BG2 enough to finish it, though, ToB is just more of a good thing.