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I do recommend this game, but your enjoyment of it will be based largely on how much you enjoy games from this era and/or enjoy Dungeons and Dragons and hack and slash type games. You don't really have to be a fan of the original Baldur's Gate series since Dark Alliance plays totally differently. It seems like this game shouldn't exist since the original Dark Alliance came out on the Gamecube and this one still plays like a Gamecube game, despite the fact that it was originally released on PS2 and Xbox.
Now, the port is not perfect, since some of the key bindings do not match what it shows on screen and it's still designed to be played with a controller. You can use the hotkeys to pull things up but when selecting different skills you still need to painstakingly scroll through a wheel and the spells seemed to be ordered randomly. If you've played games like this, you already know what to expect. Much like Diablo and other games you kill enemies, level up, complete quests all with the goal of progressing through each chapter and defeating the final boss. With that said, there really isn't that much of a story. Baldur's Gate is just the name of the town, and I believe every game has its own story that centers around the town. This one is kind of boring since it just involves vampires taking over, and each quest is just a collectathon of finding a specific item in a dungeon and returning to the quest giver. With that said, it is nice that this is somewhat of an open world game. You progress in a linear fashion, but the game doesn't really feel linear since there are sidequests and other things to do.
You start by picking from one of five characters, and this is where the game turns out to be either great or terrible depending on how you decide to play it. The biggest flaw with this game, and what keeps it from true greatness, is the fact that it seems to be optimized for a multiplayer experience, even though 90% of people who play this will probably only be doing the solo play. With that said, it is kind of ambitious that the game gives five characters to select from and also has two hidden unlockable characters (Though they don't really add much so you can skip them altogether). Now, you might think that having five different playable characters is great, and to an extent it is, since you can easily get 100+ hours of gameplay if you decide to max level each character. But the game is ridiculously unforgiving, and by that I mean that the character you pick must be played a certain way, and levelling up will not correct any deficiencies with the original character's base stats.
Basically three characters are great for single player mode, and two are just about useless. Dorn Redbear is your generic warrior type, but he's actually the best character for beating the game since the game is optimized for characters who use melee and spam the use of potions. Now Vhaidra, the monk, would seem to be a great character, after all, she's all over the artwork for the game. But she, like most monk classes in video games, is just weak in general as she is supposed to rely on her fists instead of weapons. Granted, she is very fast, so that almost makes up for it, but she has a lot of different types of skills and excels at few of them. Now the Moon Elf Ysuran is also a great character, since he's the closest thing to a mage type, the main reason he works is that he gets a summon that allows him to kite enemies and distract them while he casts spells at a distance. He is the most varied and interesting character, and he can also drain health from enemies and transmute different potion types, making him the best for stocking up on gold as well since you don't need to buy a lot of potions. The Dwarven rogue Borador is your typical archer / rogue class, but he's probably the most fun to play as. Mostly because he has a lot of different ways to kill enemies, whether by sniping them with a bow or dropping down remote detonated bombs. It seems like they put a lot of effort into making this character fun to use, even though he's not really the best character to beat the game with since he doesn't deal a ton of damage to the bosses.
And last there is the human cleric Allessia, who should be a great character but ends up being really weak in single player. She basically has two modes of attack: casting a ton of stat buffs and running in for melee or using a heavenly fire attack to deal area of effect damage to groups. While this should've been the best character in the game, she is not optimized for single player, so she always ends up dealing less damage and taking more damage by default. I tried to beat the game with her on the extreme difficulty and it was too irritating to proceed, largely because even at level 40 she still has terrible defense. I suppose the developers designed it this way since she has the ability to heal without potions, but that doesn't make much of a difference when she dies in 2-3 hits even when playing on easy mode.
Now, speaking of the difficulty, this is your standard hack and slash. You kill enemies, collect gold and level up. But the game is so oddly designed in this regard since unlike a game like Diablo, if you just play this however you want you will probably just end up getting frustrated and dying a lot. Some abilities are extremely useful, and some are totally useless. The boss fights are relentlessly difficult, even on the easier settings it is still possible to die in a couple hits if you are 10-20 levels over the boss you're fighting. With that said, the simple act of clearing different dungeons, collecting loot and leveling is as fun as it is in any other game of this nature. Each time you level up you get to pick new skills or upgrade skills. About halfway through the game each character has a unique quest that, one completed, unlocks a second set of skills. You really will probably want to play through this game with each character twice since that's how you max out all of the different skills. With that said, some of the skills do repeat among characters. The monk, for example, unlocks a second set of skills that are basically for stealth kills and these are basically useless since by that point you're going to want to run past most of the enemies.
This is actually probably the weirdest thing about this game: about halfway through, killing enemies is pointless. If you want to sit there and hack through each enemy for a little bit of gold, by all means, but the game stops giving decent experience at this point. The quests and bosses, on the other hand, still give legitimate experience that will help you level quickly. Even odder is the fact that the game gives every character access to the "sprint" command. When you sprint you can speed through the dungeons and dash past the enemies with no resistance whatsoever. The only way you can die is if you accidentally spring into a pit, which is rare. So basically the game is encouraging the player to stop killing enemies and just run straight through to the bosses. It's kind of funny, and strange, since on subsequent playthroughs instead of thinking about methodically clearing out each dungeon I instead just did the estimate of how many health potions I would need to defeat the remaining bosses. Then, simply dash past everything, ignore the gold and treasure, and kill the bosses.
So unlike a game like Diablo where you have a limited number of potions on your belt, this one just gives you up to 99 that you can use with a hotkey. The bosses are tough as nails, but if you carefully save up your potions for the harder fights, it's impossible to die. It's a weird way to design a game for sure, since it can be very easy or very difficult depending on the choices you made earlier in the game. The music is the best part of the game, since it was composed by the guy who worked on Morrowind, it sounds more epic than what the game deserves. And the graphics are dated. Still, worth playing.