Icewind Dale 2 Complete

Great game. Not better than Bulder's Gate 1 or 2 but a great game none the less. Why? Well the game feels a little ...hollow I suppose. The story will not grab you as much as Icewind Dale 1 did (or BG2 for that matter) BUT, but, the game play is fan(bloody)tastic. The new rule set (v3 I think) is implemented well (for the most part) and there is a new spell selection screen, animations etc. Well worth getting if you enjoyed Icewind Dale 1. Just do not expect it to be as good as Bulder's Gate 2. By the way, I still have the cd for this game and I still play it. It is fun. Pure and simple :)

The worst aspect of this game is the horrible Warcraft-style combat: real-time with pause. It was horrible in Baldur's Gate - it's horrible here. On higher difficulties you are forced to micro-manage your party because the AI is brain dead, which means pausing the game every half second. So, why not make it turn based in the first place? Rounds don't translate well into realtime: when you issue orders there is a delay. This can be fatal when your squishy mage just took a critical hit and your "drink healing potion" command takes 5 seconds to execute. Mages run out of spell quite quickly (that's Dungeon & Dragons rules) and your brain dead mage will run into melee when he runs out of throwing daggers. Be prepared to rest after every major battle - spells need to be relearned, again D&D rules. Party-based RPGs should be turn based! No exceptions! My second issue are the tedious levels. ACT II in particular got boring really fast. The maps are usually just filled with combat encounters with bullets sponges, so the gameplay loop is, combat, rest, combat, rest, combat, rest. Next map, rinse and repeat. The maps don't look really good and don't reward exploration. It is a hard game that provides a challenge. I actually beat it on "normal" (which translates to hard in today's standards) (original CD version, not here on GOG), and I will never play it again. It was tedious, not enjoyable or fun. Icewind Dale was slightly better because it was a bit more original and the story was better. NOT RECOMMENDED.

GOOD

Like the title says, the content is good, i just wish the game wasn't so buggy and low res :/ I really wish we could get an enhanced edition of this game, beamdog did a good job with the other enhanced editions imo, hell, even just getting some bug fixes and the area loot button and support for 1080p - 1440p would be enough for me to throw about 30 - 40 usd at them, and a 4 star review, sadly the odds of that happening anytime soon are extremely low :/

One of the best RPG games EVER !