Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

I am a HUGE fan of the whole remake scene that has become so popular in recent years. In fact, I can't think of a single remake I haven't purchased. Wether its Beyond Good & Evil on my Xbox, Final Fantasy X on my PS3, or Icewind Dale on my PC....well, I can honestly say this is my single favorite trend to come out of gaming the last 5+ years. Some people play a game and move on while others, like myself, go back & replay their favorite games time & time again. I would estimate that roughly 25-30% of my game playing time is spent replaying older games. I am also a HUGE fan of the Isometric RPG's like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. That said, this was without question one of the best updates I have come across yet. It captures the magic of Icewind Dale beautifully and I didn't run into any bugs at all, at least none that I was aware of. I really can't give this game a higher recommendation. If your a fan of Icewind Dale, or just a fan of Isometric styled games in general, you owe it to yourself to give this game a whirl. Trust me, you won't be disappointed. As for the price, $20 is an absolute STEAL for this game! Its amazing how cheap some gamers have become. $20 is a perfectly reasonable launch price for a game of this length and quality. Just because its a remake doesn't mean they have to give it away and just because you bought it 10 years ago doesn't mean you should get a discount, lol. While there are a LOT of cheapskates in the PC market these days (a massive understatement), there are also a lot of people who are perfectly willing to pay $20 for a game like this. So don't expect the launch price for games like this to change anytime soon. As long as there are people willing to pay these prices, which there are, they will continue to be launched at these price levels. People that have a problem with it will simply have to wait! If your one of those people, don't go away mad, just go away! I am sure your $2 bundle with Icewind Dale will show up eventually.

Positive parts first: the game is fairly stable. I have had only a few crashes, and never in a way that caused me to lose progress. The game is very story oriented, so there is very little replayability. The only reason to replay a campaign would be to try a different party in the same story you saw the first time. The game slavishly follows D&D mechanics, even when this makes the interface confusing or gameplay worse. Armor Class is a complete mess. Good armor lowers your AC, but armor-improving spells give you +AC. Most fantasy games make magic users weak early on and overpowered later. Icewind Dale is no exception, but magic users remain frustrating throughout due to the limited number of spell slots per rest cycle, the ease with which the player can accidentally cancel an in-progress spell, and the difficulty of using area affect spells without causing friendly fire accidents. Once a caster begins a spell, whether successful or interrupted, that spell slot is exhausted until a successful rest. The caster must plan spell slots before a rest cycle, so poor choices may mean the party must retreat, change spells, sleep, and resume the attack. Resurrecting dead characters is so much trouble that save-scumming to prevent character death is widely encouraged. Multiplayer is unreliable and feels like a last minute add-on. Scroll Cases and Ammo Belts sometimes mysteriously turn empty on some systems, then return to their rightful contents on a later game reload. Monster synchronization is often fair, but sometimes monsters are in completely the wrong place on some screens. Sometimes items vanish when transferred between characters run by different players. Sometimes recently identified items revert to unidentified when transferred. If any player opens an NPC dialogue, every player is interrupted until the dialogue ends. As a minor nuisance, many frequently used hotkeys are hard bound to FN keys and cannot be reassigned.

I played all of the Infinity Engine games, except IWD2, when they were new and of the ones that I've played, IWD was the only one that I immediately forgot about. Couldn't remember anything about it apart from it being boring and full of combat. Upon recently replaying it in the EE remaster, I'm not surprised that was the case. Interplay really wanted a piece of a Diablo-like action RPG pie. With Infinity Engine, D&D license and Fallout team being less stubborn about not doing a Diablo clone, they finally could get what they wanted. And it turns out that a party-based, D&D based, realtime with a pause Diablo is simply not fun. It's pure dungeon crawling, with magic items and exp showering the player constantly. The plot is... well, present, but has nothing substantial to it and barely any atmosphere, unlike Diablo. Locations get progressively more boring to go through, with more and more sluggish fights, which are sometimes incredibly cheap. And then the whole thing kinda ends, long past due. EE does make a lot of tiny welcome improvements that make this boring slaughter-fest less tedious (lack of loading screens alone makes the experience far more fun), yet doesn't really fix the terrible party pathfinding and AI, so you still need to babysit your team through every smaller in size room or corridor unless you want to watch them violently vibrate into walls and each other for half a minute. IWD was an okay way to pass time before Baldur's Gate 2 release, though even then it was forgettable to all but most die-hard min-maxing Infinity Engine combat fans. But ever since then, the reasons to return to this game were growing slimmer with each year. By now? IWD, and especially the terrible expansion+add-on, might as well be forgotten.

Don't fell in to the trap of all the 5 stars. It's all nostalgia speaking. If you liked baldur's gate, chances are you won't like this, at all. All you do is kill kill kill and kill and some loot, occasionally some talk, but honestly all of those are pointless and the way you act matters almost zero. Not to mention the price is incredibly high, put another 20 dollars and go buy witcher 3 game of the year edition. It is thousands of times better.

Bought the game and was enjoying it till I came across a game breaking bug. I couldn't continue after about 25% through the game and my time was wasted. Avoid at all costs.