Icewind Dale 2 Complete

Icewind Dale 2, essentially does what anyone who played the first game would expect it to do, but grander. Its combat is more interesting due to the greater number of abilities, skills and spells at your disposal, and the larger number of creatures assailing you at times. Its dungeons are more varied and better designed. It's story is not exactly deep stuff, but it's by no means bad either, and again, more to my tastes than the first game. The adventure pack is new to me, however, and I mean to ask what it adds exactly, and if its enough to make this worth buying again when I have the disks.

Excellent sequel to IWD 1, and a must for any fan of the Infinity Engine CRPGs. HOF (Insane Difficulty) mode is where it's at; level your party to around level 15 or so through normal mode, then replay the game in HOF mode for extremely challenging, action-packed, tactical/strategic gameplay against hordes of elite mobs, setting up the "perfect kill". Admittedly, this usually means training mobs to chokepoints for AOE sorceror mayhem with Wail of the Banshee and Horrid Wiliting :) Cheesy? Perhaps, but it's also a complete blast!

This game was the last of the classic infinity engine games and as such it was released in a rushed schedule. It is algo the only game in the series that was using the 3e rules and it shows. The game is enjoyable but much longer than required, you can feel there is a lot of filler and unnecesary combat. The overall dificulty of the combats is also uneven, in parts doesn't feel as strategic than icwd1. The loot also was not spectacular, except in the final chapter. The game in this gog release has an excelent cloud save inplementation.

Storywise I felt it was quite railroady, but it made up for it with the sheer fun that the near-constant combat made for, the difficulty afforded by HoF mode, the incredible variety of feasible character builds... nearly ten years on and still a favourite

Icewind Dale II has proven to be a solid mixture of fun and frustration. If you've enjoyed the original icewind Dale, you'll have fun with it, but it's not the same as it's predecessor. In fact, where Icewind Dale 2 differs is in it's struggle to be more than the original. Surely, a worthy goal for any sequel - take the original, include the things about it that made it good, and add more. Taking the original elements of Icewind Dale, the development team went back to original pen and paper games and took notes on what makes a good pen and paper game so unique and enjoyable. Then, using the proven success of the original, added those wonderful pen and paper elements. Sounds good right? Well, not really. A deep, immersive plot that requires thinking and deductive reasoning to figure out is a key element in a real life D&D game; but when part of a CRPG, it becomes obtuse and wears your patience thin, and usually just is flat out confusing. Puzzles, riddles, and suddenly being forced into a bad situation in a pen and paper game results in amazingly creative solutions that can make your characters real heroes. When it's tried here, the infinity engine just falters and fails, leaving a frustrating situation where you're clueless and looking up walkthroughs to figure out the exact thing the game wants you to do. It gets worse as well - when you get it wrong, and you can get it wrong, you can break the game and prevent forward progress; speaking from experience, I ended up having to either re-start via a very old saved game, give up, or cheat through a level because a key plot element wasnt working because i missed a 'trigger' somewhere that flagged a variable the game needed to proceed. It all sounds bleak, I know. But not everyong runs into issues, and maybe you wont. But in general, you'll likely have periods of the same fun you had in IWD, broken up by forced puzzles that arent much fun at best, and frustrating at worst. For IWD fans, still recommended.