Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

Classic. More linear than Baldur's Gate, but still thoroughly enjoyable. Love creating/controlling a whole party of characters. Battles can be very challenging and sometimes need repeating, but with the classic save and load scheme, it is not a hassle. Want an old-school AD&D experience then you've come for the right game. Good story. Good times. I have seen LPs of the enhanced edition and thankfully they only added on without taking away. Enoy.

And of course, now the original can't be bought anymore.

It's a great game, well worth the money (I got it in sale for $8). The only thing that bothers me somehow is the strange sound design. I mean - the game has really nice background music - yet the problem is, you almost never get to hear it! It starts playing very rarely and fades out way too often and quickly without any obvious reason - so 95 % of the time you are left with only ambient sound effects, which are quite dull and they definitely don't make up for an atmosphere the music could provide. The only music you actually get to hear quite often are the battle tunes which start (sometimes) when you spot an enemy. But these are all quite similar and they get kind of repetitve and annoying after a while. What I'm really missing are some not so dramatic tunes playing while you are just exploring or when you're visiting a friendly towns. Again, the towns usually DO have some very nice theme songs - the problem is they start playing maybe in 1 of 10 visits and most of the time you're just wandering through them in (almost) complete silence, which really sucks :( Fortunatelly, the rest of the game is great. Lot of features, lot of items, lot of possibilities to make every character unique... As others mentioned, the story is quite linear and it's mostly about the combat. But I don't mind. It's challenging and still far from Diablo style. What you need here are tactics, not just fast fingers... So, if you want some D&D style tactical hack & slash, this one is probably one of the best options available.

I really like IceWind Dale, it's one of my favorite games. However, I'm talking about the original, Beamdog ruined this game for me. The only thing I rate on the plus is higher resolution. The screens of the characters, the appearance of objects, icons, character classes and races are taken from Baldur. Added to this are errors that spoil immersion.

Playing this game makes me feel like I'm doing something very, very important.