Lot of flash, No substance.
The overland map is a cool addition, and convinced me to use skills I've previously considered useless. It's large and there are a lot of things to be found, and it serves actively in gameplay. This is good, because you will spend about 95% of your time on it. Unfortunately, it comes with a great many sacrifices; that is, the entire rest of the game.
The games story is as basic, boring, and as nonexistent as it could be and still have one. There's very few quests that actually pertain to the main story, that is, Zehir and what he wants. There's no grand scheme, no hidden intentions, no engrossing plot line or engaging characters, as we have come to know in the previous Bioware games. It has all been replaced by the over world map. If you care to read it, I will reveal the whole plot in one short sentence at the end of the review.
A sacrifice made was dungeons and cities. There's perhaps 2 dozen places on the world map you can actually enter, including 3 towns. Of these few dungeons all but one are little more than, if at all, one room. If you roll all of them together you might have roughly the mass of one dungeon from previous games. The towns aren't much bigger. Prepare to explore nothing more than the world map.
There's no engaging characters to be found anymore either. You're entire party is made by you, a nice addition, but it will feel like laziness when you play the game, because they really add nothing to the game you couldn't get with a single character, barring the obvious ability to make your own characters. The cohorts will further make you're additional party members feel unnecessary, as they can now be classed any way you can make them fit, and add nothing to the game besides bodies to the party (like you're extra people). If anything, having a party of your own hurts re-playability, because with a varied party you can use whatever speech or skill option you choose at any time, so there's no need to replay with a different character with different skills to see how the game would be different. Most of the speech and skill options end you up the same way anyway.
Interesting non-party-NPC's are missing too. There's no grand villian at all. Sorry but Zehir is not in the game, and you won't even know who the final guy is till you kill him, and you'll never know what he wants. It's a small blessing, because the bad guy really does nothing in the game, so you don't really care who he is anyway. I think they only put a final encounter into the game so the game would end. In all likelihood, you will only remember 2 non-party-NPC's in the game, because that is the only 2 you will talk to more than once.
There aren't many quests to be found in the game, and they aren't really that interesting. Pretty much the basic go and kill quests, with a tiny few with more interesting choices. There's maybe a handful of new items in the game, but most are simply reused pieces from the main game and previous expansion.
I had read this game was supposed to add up to 30 hours of gameplay, and it might, although this number clearly expects you to fight random battles constantly on the world map and spend a lot of time exploring on you're own. If you simply did the quests and the story while avoiding trade and random encounters, the game might last 6 hours.
There is also a lot of glitches in the game. I shipped resources back to my headquarters and could not remove them from the warehouse, ever. The game mysteriously lags in single player, a lot. You will run a ways and suddenly teleport back to the the door. On a related note, I would get randomly kicked from dungeons and into the world map. Also, for some reason I could no longer level up my warlock as a Hellfire Warlock past level 3. It simply did not let me choose to level up as one, even though I still met the requirements. There is also a quest to help some chickens, but after when I found them again and entered the encounter, it was empty, and it has remained that way since. I also went through a lot of pains because my characters would get stuck on EVERYTHING and I often found myself moving them individually (the only good thing about the dungeons being so small, and they don't make you group you're party to use exits). Finally, during the final encounter, my 2 cohorts fell through the floor and were stuck, and couldn't do anything the entire battle.
That said, the new prestige classes are cool, and the new races are a nice addition. The one nice thing about the world map is I'm sure a lot of modders will do some amazing things with it. However, I'm not the kind to play user made campaigns, so this means little to me. The music is nice, and I even found myself listening to it on occasions. But as far as gameplay goes, there's really none to be found.
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SPOILER
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So you decided you'd like to know if the story is worth it before you play after reading my review? Well here it is:
-Some Yuan-ti have turned to a new god (Zehir) and want world dominion.-
There it was, the whole story. Exciting eh? You can actually finish the whole game and only fight 9 agents of Zehir, and in case you are wondering, yes, that would be the final encounter, although only 2 of those agents worth giving unique titles to, and none of them were worth having a name.