Baldur's Gate 3 is a 9/10 that gets overrated to a 10/10 due to how (from what I have personally observed), this is the only crpg to reach broad public appeal in the past two decades and the fact that the game's best and highest quality content is all in the first act (due to how act 1 was in early access for years so naturally had the most feedback). My only real gripe in act 2 being how they lost the potential of making it almost survival like in having to constantly return to the tavern and try and survive the curse, with the entire mechanic being gone in the first 30 minutes of gameplay.

The primary issue is that act 1 is outstanding and very well crafted in its reactivity and breadth of choices and options for the player to approach the story, but once you progress further, the quality dips and the cracks start showing, due to the development of the later acts being rushed.

Reactivity: I would estimate that as a duregar oath of vengeance paladin I had approximately 2 unique dialogue choices per hour on average (while these aren't true reactivity for the most part, they do offer the illusion of it and as such allow the player to roleplay and immerse themselves as the world reacts to who they choose to be). In contrast, act 2 I believe only had 0.5 and finally act 3 I would say was 0.1 (albeit here I lost lots of time due to performance issues I will get into). As such the reactivity decreases as the game furthers.

Quest design: as in the first 2 acts it always felt like there a hundred different ways to solve every problem, but in act 3 it felt much more linear. For example, in act 3 you are tasked with solving a murder, and I tried to investigate their bodies, but there was nothing physical on them and then I went to the basement to investigate the murder site but found nothing there either, as a bug prevented me from getting a perception check I believe. So I gave up and used speak with dead and solved it from there, as such it seemed to only really be one way to approach the issue.

Performance and bugs: I have a fairly old pc with old spec (1660 ti and a samsung non nvme ssd), but despite this acts 1 and 2 ran amazingly and I don't believe I had any performance issues there the entire time, barring the occasionally long combat turns, which were even then minor. In contrast act 3 became a chore to play through and explore with a handful of cutscenes taking 5 minutes to load, so my player character could just walk around but couldn't interact. The most major one of all was constantly (I estimate 1 every 20 minutes) the game would just stop and again my player character could walk around but the companions were frozen and I couldn't interact with anything for typically 1 minute each time, and this issue caused me to stop my playthrough and return to act 1.

Story: The main story of this game was fairly good, but it felt unfocused, with the astral prism and dream guardian being clearly rewritten heavily and so doesn't really flow as well unfortunately. The most glaring issue is the fact that in a game with so much reactivity, it follows the trend again of act 3 having barely any consequences, as the entire story was based around using or rejecting illithid powers in order to defeat the dead three, but the endings are the same and there are ZERO consequences to whether you go full out or whether you completely reject them, with it still being the exact same binary choice at the end. The story and the quests are also very black and white and good vs evil, with it always being clear from the start who is good and who is evil as I don't think there was a single point where a quest flipped the tables and shown someone who appears good actually being evil, for exactly never once does the game consider that a refugee may actually be evil and an absolute cultist as well. This clear binary good and evil fits the D&D universe very well and the story too so I don't have any real issue with it.

Companions: I liked most of the companions, as there was a fairly even mix of good and bad, but I have two issues. The first is that every companion has some super unique and interesting thing that they only have to them, eg Karlach's heart, gales orb, laezael being a frog woman (excusable as she isnt that much different from her kin), shadowhearts pain and being tasked with the search, astarions scars, wylls pact and super important father and history. These them selves don't feel like an issue until the fact that this is a level 1 adventure, and the player character has nothing unique or interesting to them (unless they play dark urge, which I believe they should have combined dark urge and pure origin, as that could offer a whole new layer of roleplaying and choice for the player and makes them feel less different than their comrades, however it would require some tweaking to make it more blank-slatey). The other issue is the prevalence of sexuality, which for some companions felt extremely exaggerated and almost like a caricature (looking at you Halsin), but this is more of a personal issue than anything else.

Combat: I enjoyed the combat as it felt simple and yet deep in lots of ways, but I did find fights less enjoyable as I went on, primarily in act 3 again due to it often just being fighting 100 people (I despise the sharran fight), but there were also some of the best combat sections in act 3 as well. I particularly enjoyed the iron throne due to how interesting it was to try and do it optimally and save everyone, with it having 100 different ways to approach it, the orin fight as it didn't feel needlessly difficult yet still requiring thought and the steel watch foundry boss due to primarily the ability to kill the hellfire watchers next to the titans and cause them to self destruct.

Overall, Baldurs Gate 3 is an amazing game that does so much well yet consistently fails in the final act, which I pray to every god that Larian will fix and improve, yet despite its failings it is an easy recommend to anyone, and while this review comes off as a mad rant (which it kind of is), it is primarily to try and inform others of the games failings as criticism seems to mostly be deflected by some parts of the community.