Recent reviews by Boots

It's an engaging RPG that gives you meaningful choices throughout. The writing is great, it really expands on the lore established in the Pillars of Eternity games. Combat is fun, and the skill trees provide a lot of options. The weakest point in the game is the equipment progression system, trying to upgrade your equipment to strong tiers means that you break down everything except what you are using at the moment for resources. This leads to much less experimentation with different weapons or armor.
I'm really enjoying it and will be replaying.

It's a great DLC I picked it up on sale and have no regrets!

10/10 fantastic game

I wanted to like the game, but I felt the pacing was too slow, in terms of animation, progression, and moment to moment gameplay.

The loss of a mech on a map always felt like a major hinderance; worse then the loss of a soldier in the newer XCOM games.
This forces you to play slower and position more defensively to avoid taking damage.

I can see the appeal of the game but it's not for me.

BG1 has a weaker story then BG2 but the feeling of progression and exploration when playing is fantastic.
The game is older and lacks a lot of QoL features, companion AI is notably bad. Additionally it's missing things like damage templates for AoE spellsI. It doesn't play as smoothly as other games of it's era (such as fallout 1/2).
But with all that said it's worth a playthrough if you're a fan of older RPGs or realtime with pause.

I've played through this once and have no desire to do so again.

A lot of the fights are just your party vs large mobs, and very few of these encounters stick out as interesting.
I'm not sure where the game peaked for me, but it was not during the final chapter. it was probably escaping the castle after infiltrating underground, but going to avernus was just boring with not anything really difficult about the final fight
The story is really predictable and lacks any sort of buildup to the point where having the setup for baldurs gate 2 occur feels out of place.

There are also quite a lot of bugs with quests in the expansion that prevent you from completing them; these are just side quests but it's something to note.

All in all I think it's worth playing once if you can get it on sale and liked bg1

It took an hour or two before the game really clicked. But after it did it was hard to put down and, there are a lot of different things your solving at once, so if one gives you trouble you can move to another and rethink.

There's a fantastic progression system in the game.
The higher difficulties introduce more systems to keep track of, but also require more mastery of the basic ones (such as providing better food selection for the population instead of just not starving).

It's a fun game that can really put you in a trance as you peel apart a spaceship.

This game feels like a 5e game you're playing with friends