Baldur's Gate is a beardy game. It has wizards, it has dwarves and it has pages of statistics. You could grow quite large quantities of stubble just reading the instruction manual, but Baldur's Gate is also an epic, fun and compelling RPG. Based on the pen and paper RPG series of Dungeons & Dragons, the game gives you incredible freedom of choice.

When you start, you create your own character. You can choose to be any race from pointy-eared elves to burly, bearded dwarves (and that's just the females). You can choose your gender, colour of clothing, alignment (i.e. whether you are good, neutral or evil) and one of the most important aspects, character class, which ranges from fighter to thief and mage to ranger. Your class dictates the skills that you will have, the weapons you can use and how much health you will have. A fighter will usually have a lot of health and the ability to use just about any weapon they choose, while a mage will only be able to wield the weediest of pointy sticks but will be able to cast some powerful (and not so powerful) spells to defeat enemies and heal allies. Various other classes also have essential skills; clerics and druids also wield magic but most of their spells revolve around protecting or healing rather than causing havoc with enemies. Thieves can obviously steal items but they can also disarm traps and creep about unnoticed too. You can also change a character's statistics, such as their strength, intelligence, charisma and other characteristics. Matching these to a class is essential; a fighter who doesn't have enough strength to carry decent armour or weaponry won't get far and a mage with the intelligence of a rabid gibberling probably won't be much good at learning spells - you'll need to choose your main character's skills wisely if you want them to survive.

Once you've made your character you start out in the town of Candlekeep, which acts as the training ground. There are a number of small quests to perform here and you can go to the Inn to kit yourself out in some decent adventuring gear. You're told to go meet Gorion, your adopted father and a powerful mage who informs you that you must leave the town, as it is no longer safe. Sure enough, soon after leaving Candlekeep you and Gorion run into an ambush. Gorion tells you to run, while he defeats all of the adversaries except a mysterious figure in black armour who promptly bashes him with a big sword. The next morning you wake up and begin your quest by meeting your old childhood friend who followed you and Gorion. She will join your party and before too long you'll meet a host of other characters that are willing to join you such as the mentally unhinged mage Xzar, and Minsc, who always keeps his pet miniature giant space hamster called Boo with him (you think I'm joking?)

At first you may be bewildered as to what you should be doing but you'll soon hear of an iron crisis, where all the iron being mined is weak and breaking. A number of characters who may join your party have an interest in solving the crisis, so that seems the next logical step and soon you'll be delving into mines to find out what's going wrong. As you slowly uncover the strange plot behind the iron shortage and the growing tensions between the southern region of Amn and Baldur's Gate, you'll meet new friends, ever more powerful foes and gain new abilities.

Graphically, Baldur's Gate is nothing too special. The game didn't look hugely impressive when released but the pre-rendered backdrops do create the fantasy world nicely and the sheer amount going on at any one time during some of the larger battles is quite impressive. The music gives the game a decent fantasy atmosphere and the characters in your party yell battle cries and warn you when they are low on health. In fact, some of the speech is laugh-out-loud funny.

But gameplay is the most important aspect and what a game this is. Although based on Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to the CPU this game plays in real time. The interface is quite simple, allowing you to pretty much point and click, using various icons to tell characters to move, attack, cast spells carry out a special skill or stop their current action. It may seem simplistic but quite frankly there's so much strategy and planning in the battles that it doesn't matter when the actions themselves require little input from yourself.

The main plot, which I won't spoil for you, sucks you into the Forgotten Realms world and drives you to advance through the main game, while your desire for ever more experience points and items compels you to take on the challenge of the numerous sub-quests on offer. The game is so epic that there are large areas of countryside and shoreline you never actually have to visit to complete the main game. Most of these have a number of sub-quests contained within and it's fun to just explore the vast landscapes of the game testing your mettle against the beasts you meet.

The fun of just wandering about taking on enemies cannot be underestimated either. One of the main driving factors behind RPGs of this type is character advancement. You get a real sense of achievement when characters go up a level, learning more skills for you to test out in battle. Also enemies usually leave gold behind, as well as weapons and other items that can be used or sold, and believe me, you'll need to accumulate plenty of gold to buy some of the meatier weapons, armour and accessories - that's another part of the character advancement. When you first get that long sword +2 or full plate mail, you can't wait to try it out in battle. Equipping your party with all the best items becomes an obsession, not just because it helps you beat your opponents but because you want the satisfaction of having the best damn items around.

Another great aspect is the freedom. You don't have to go anywhere the game tells you. You can simply explore at your leisure - you don't even have to be the good guy. You can create a band of merciless thugs and go about towns killing innocents, stealing from shops and generally doing all the things you can't usually do in games. But if you do these things your reputation (yes, you even have a reputation meter) will lower and pretty soon people such as innkeepers or shop owners will refuse to speak to you and you'll have the law in constant pursuit.

Quite simply, this is a stunning package. By the end of Baldur's Gate you will have battled vast numbers of foes from small kobolds to mighty Golems, from packs of hobgoblins to armies of the undead. You will have delved deep into mines, infiltrated bandit camps, explored dangerous woodlands and marvelled at the sheer scale of the city of Baldur's Gate (when you can finally cross its bridge). Don't underestimate the scale either; the city has numerous inns, taverns, shops, temples and even a museum. Just walking through the various buildings in the city of Baldur's Gate you can get involved in pub brawls, foil robberies and uncover numerous side stories.

The main game on its own will take upwards of sixty hours to complete, most likely a lot more if you do a fair share of the sub-quests, ranging from small-scale item fetching to rescuing a mage in a Gnoll stronghold, to becoming a member of a thieves guild. And this is without even mentioning the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion that allows your characters to reach higher levels (and thus gain new skills and spells) and adds a number of new areas to explore. You'll uncover a wealth of powerful items exploring the utterly insane trap-filled Durlag's Tower and an island full of werewolves.

There's also plenty to motivate you to play through the game again. Creating a completely different character of different class, race and alignment you can find sub-quests you missed or simply couldn't solve initially, get different characters to join your party and experience the new skills they have to offer. I have started the game numerous times, creating a wide variety of characters, and have played through to the end about three times. You can even play online or over a network with up to five friends creating characters and adventuring alongside you.

Baldur's Gate is without doubt one of the very best RPGs of recent years. The graphics and sound effects, whilst not spectacular, are nicely detailed and serve the gameplay very well. The gameplay itself however is totally addictive with a massive world, total freedom to explore, almost endless sub-quests, a compelling storyline and plenty of character advancement. Get it and prepare to lose sleep, your friends and your social life.

Reviewed by AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).