I want to love Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad. Really, I do. And in its first few moments, as I created a new character and assigned my stat points with its responsive touch controls, I dared to believe that my few concerns with the PC version last month would translate into success with this portable version of the 14-year-old classic. This, I felt then, was how Baldur's Gate should be played. And yet it insists on breaking my heart. Deep down, this remains the exciting RPG that inspired later favorites such as Dragon Age: Origins and Neverwinter Nights, but its iPad incarnation suffers from wonky controls that make the simplest actions a chore.
It might be hard for a younger generation to accept this now, but playing Baldur's Gate felt like a revelation upon its first appearance in 1998. Three years before Peter Jackson's first Lord of the Rings movie, it revitalized the high fantasy genre for gaming and sparked an RPG renaissance that continues to this day. Those of us who approached it with the knowledge of years' worth of nights of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons marveled not only at its memorable (if somewhat clichéd) story, but also in the ways it translated the arcane calculations of THAC0 and saving throws for the screen. Pausing the action to assign attacks for each member of the party recaptured the rolls of dice across the dinner table without the long delays, and the lush artwork for character icons made up for the limitations of the sprites themselves.
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition fares better on PC.
The key to appreciating this new release lies in its name. This isn't a remake; it merely takes the skeleton of the original game and fleshes it out with enhanced visuals and a treasure trove of tweaks quietly stitched into the interface. Yet that's a bigger undertaking than it might sound like. Erased, allegedly, are more than 400 bugs that plagued the original, although my playthrough suggests that several new bugs made their way in as well. Dialogue options sometimes don't respond, and laughably, selecting Minsc's famed hamster once caused a crash. The iPad version in particular has an unfortunate tendency to crash on some of the busier battles, and framerates can slow to a crawl when someone casts an entangle spell.
Some of the "enhanced" changes will disappoint fans of the original like myself, such as the way the animated cutscenes of the original give way to unsatisfying illustrated montages with clipped dialogue. Others just seem silly, such as the way developer Overhaul struck the inoffensive and memorable Nietzsche quote from the opening two or three seconds. The old, blurry GUI remains more or less intact aside from a widescreen modification, but its background colors now have a dubious tendency toward blues rather than greens and grays.
Even so, plenty of welcome improvements lie in store, such as the way the option to zoom in and out by pinching the screen allows a welcome degree of precision demanded by the iPad's smallish screen. As a downside, doing so lets you see the simple sprites in all their pixelated glory, which reveals the limitations of the "enhanced" visuals. Gone are the cumbersome quest logs that demanded flipping through successive pages; in their place, there are familiar drop-down toggles well-suited to the touch-based design of the iPad. Smaller improvements abound, and players who aren't keen on creating their own characters with expanded options that include the class kits from Baldur's Gate II can choose from a selection of premades.
Death (and a quick restart) almost certainly awaits.
But Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition stumbles on the mechanics of its basic touch-based gameplay, and stumbles badly at that. It doesn't waste any time. I, who'd played through both the original and last month's PC release, couldn't even get through the first door without several finger taps in an attempt to find the "right" trigger spot. I was to relive this moment with doors and stairwells throughout the rest of the entire game. In the PC version, mouseovers help you discover interactive objects such as lootable chests and bodies; here, interacting with said objects entails knowing to click on them since there's no prompt, and even then, the finicky quirks of the touch-based system means you might not trigger them anyway. Combat suffers from similar problems: I'd sometimes release the pause button to find that I hadn't successfully tapped an enemy, after all, and my heroes would stand around as though waiting for a bus.
The inventory system's even worse. Holding down your finger on an item in the cumbersome inventory screen acts like a right click with a mouse if you want information for an icon, but even with practice, you'll sometimes end up accidentally using potions you only wanted to look at. Elsewhere, there's no way to tell spells apart from each other aside from memorization unless you've filled every spell slot. Even the sliders for menus sometimes fail to respond. Given enough time, it's possible to live with these quirks (but not to get used to them), but that's no excuse for such unfriendly design. And to think, I'm coming to this with the knowledge of a veteran player; for a newcomer, all this must seem like a tablet-throwing nightmare.
Inventory UI has been tweaked, but it too suffers from touch control issues.
The inclusion of extra content softens the disappointment, particularly with the Black Pits, a gladiatorial mode that throws you in 15 increasingly difficult battles of enemies for the amusement of Baeloth the Entertainer. It's fun, but I spent most of my time fighting the same battles to earn enough XP and gold for gear in the Black Pits shop to tackle the higher rounds with confidence. I found it most useful for experimenting with tactical battles to prepare for similar challenges in the campaign, and it contains just enough voiced story--complete with surprisingly adept voice acting--to keep it from feeling like a tacked-on sideshow feature. New players may enjoy using it for combat practice, as Baldur's Gate remains as challenging as it ever was. Then as now, if you're not prepared, it's possible that you'll find yourself dead after your first encounter with some run-of-the-mill assassin while still within the walls of Candlekeep. In an age when words like "enhanced" all too often carry the stain of oversimplification when applied to refurbished classics, Overhaul Games' refusal to sacrifice the challenge of Baldur's Gate warrants applause.
But in its current state, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad is a tough sell. On the one hand, considering its more than 100 hours of rewarding RPG combat and story, I think I'm safe in saying that there's nothing quite like it on the App Store, but on the other, the bugs and maddening problems with item and doorway selection make it a poor substitute for either the original PC version or Overhaul's enhanced edition. Even my favorite bits from Overhaul's recent, well, overhaul exist only as downloadable content (namely, the wild mage Neera and the dour warrior Dorn Il-Kahn--available for $2.99 each), although the mediocre monk Rasaad yn Bashir comes with the core package. Still, it's a testament to the power of BioWare's early genius that the core package manages to entice after all these years, and if you're brave enough to do battle with the poor controls, you'll still find an unforgettable epic well suited to the portability of the iPad.
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