Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

The pitch

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance is a 2001 PlayStation 2 classic — a fast, isometric hack-and-slash set in the Forgotten Realms, built on Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition rules, following three playable heroes through a dungeon-crawling campaign around the city of Baldur's Gate. Snowblind Studios' original earned a reputation as one of the better licensed D&D action games of its era, and this 2021 release brought it to PC and modern consoles for the first time.

The game itself holds up

Reading the corpus, this isn't a contested point: reviewers across both recommendation columns agree the underlying 2001 game is good. "The game is great! It's perfect. It's like a D&D campaign, but just for you," reads one review that still voted thumbs-down over separate issues. Nostalgic enthusiasm for the wider franchise runs deep too — several of the most-upvoted positive reviews aren't really about this game at all, they're pleas for the developer to also port Champions of Norrath and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II, the era's other beloved Snowblind titles.

A rough PC port that never fully recovered its reputation

The 2021 launch drew immediate, detailed criticism about the quality of the port itself. "No graphics options, so the UI is huge and blurry," reads one review from launch week; another calls it "a copy/paste from the old game with some effects" rather than a proper PC adaptation. Steam's own news feed for the game shows Interplay pushing several fixes in the days immediately after launch — graphics settings, a load-screen crash, framerate and ultrawide support — so some of this was addressed quickly. What wasn't addressed, according to multiple reviews, was the absence of Steam achievements, and the broader sense that this was a functional but minimal port rather than a proper remaster.

The pricing story that's followed the game into 2026

The more serious pattern in this corpus is recent rather than historical. Independently, in December 2025, three of this game's highest-voted reviews ever — 240, 204 and 197 votes — describe the same specific sequence of events: the Steam price was raised from US$29.99 to US$39.99 shortly before the December 2025 winter sale, at which point a "discount" brought it back down to close to its original price. One review states the comparison plainly: "On Xbox, PlayStation, and even Epic Games the non-sale price is still $29.99" — implying the increase was specific to the Steam storefront. A later review, from July 2026, is still raising the same complaint, calling it "Deceptive Pricing" and describing it as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time event. This review cannot independently verify pricing history across every storefront, and reports this as what reviewers are describing, dated and sourced to their own reviews, rather than as an established fact about the publisher's intent — but the consistency and vote weight behind these reports make it something any prospective buyer should check for themselves before purchasing, comparing the current Steam price against other platforms.

Where sentiment sits now

Recent English reviews — the 100 most recent, spanning March 2025 to August 2026 — run 67% positive, a meaningful step down from the 81.4% lifetime score. That gap lines up with the timing of the pricing complaints rather than any change to the game itself, which hasn't been meaningfully updated since its early 2021 patches.

Value

At NZ$56.99 with no discount currently listed, this is a lot to ask for a 2001 game with a still-basic PC port, and it's worth comparing the price across storefronts before buying given what reviewers report. On an actual, verified discount, the underlying game is easily worth picking up for the nostalgia and the co-op; at an inflated "sale" price, it isn't.

Verdict

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance the game earns its nostalgic reputation — a solid, D&D-flavoured hack-and-slash that plenty of returning players still enjoy. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance the Steam listing has spent the past year accumulating well-documented reviewer complaints about a price hike timed to disguise itself as a sale. Buy the game if you love the source material, but check the current price against other storefronts first, and don't trust a "% off" banner here at face value.