Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

The title of this review might seem like a joke but this is actually a great casual game once you get your party underway. How do I mean? Well, because the story is told in chunks, once you've got your marching orders you can take the combat portions at whatever pace you like. Fight for an hour, then rest your party and go do the dishes (in real life, not the game.) Strategize while you are away--the game rewards thinking carefully about your battle plan. Come back later and pick up where you left off. Just make sure you have at least some knowledge about the basics of building a good party. Once you do that, everything falls into place. It took me three tries to get it right, but the game is frustratingly hard if you don't, though you can adjust the difficulty down, too. This enhanced edition is excellent. It plays smooth as butter on my older computer.

I haven't played Balder's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, or any other D&D-based game yet, though I'm familiar with the basics of the universe as a whole (elementals, beholders, the different kinds of dragons, etc.), so I have little basis for comparison with other D&D computer games (or the old version of Icewind Dale, either). On its own merits, Icewind Dale EE is an enjoyable adventure, though a bit clumsy and flawed in some areas. Pros: A fairly engaging, if basic story with a lot of different factions interacting in a believable manner and a wide variety of settings and foes. Considering the small area of the world the game seems to be set in, they managed to cram in a lot of different environments, though only a couple were really memorable. Controlling six characters at once requires you to think strategically now and then. Adding to the tactical side is a massive array of spells (I think there were about two dozen per level) that give you a lot of options. The expansion was fun and had some great lore involved, though the Luremaster part was painfully difficult and felt more like an endurance test than a quest. Cons: The pathfinding when going through a doorway is annoying- the characters all need to go through at once, but often one will run off in the other direction and need to be called back. There seems to be no in-universe way to replace a character if they get blasted by a death spell or disintegrated- you just have to reload or else go on with a constantly-dwindling party. There is a bug near the end that sometimes prevents a quest from being completed (and apparently kept me from getting the best sword in the game!). Too many spells you can't realistically cast without hitting your own party, and it's very hard to cast spells without getting hit and interrupted every time. The characters aren't very memorable, the story is linear and the quests are usually simplistic. It's fun to play through once, but will be quickly forgotten.

I didn't like Icewind Dale back in the day and I didn't like it when I took it to play eighteen years later. My impression was that it looked like Baldur's Gate, but it didn't have the characters, the story and the exploration, the dungeons had no end and it was frustratingly difficult. I tried hard to get into the game for what it is, a dungeon crawl, and I eventually did. The hardest part is the beginning. Creating an effective party takes many tries and I restarted this game so many times I got burned by the music in the title screen, in Easthaven and in the Vale of Shadows. I was so upset about the music that I was flabbergasted by people who said that they loved it. Then I turned sound down, put some podcasts to play in the background and 20 hours later I managed to create a party where the killing rate was close to 20% for each character except for the bard, who didn't fight much. With a well balanced party the game is very enjoyable. It is very satisfying to see your party hack through hordes of enemies that would kick your previous party's asses, and see they grow stronger with each level. There is definitely a learning curve, or rather, a learning wall that you have to climb, even if you are experienced in AD&D Infinity Engine games. It took me a while to understand why people love this game so much. Later I learned that you can replace party members if you move your save from the \save folder into \mpsave and load it on multiplayer, then you create your new characters, save, and move your save back again to \save. That way you can tweak your party in single player without having to start from the beginning. This should be a feature.

One of my favourite games from 20 years ago. This does not disappoint. The magic is still there and it looks as beautiful as ever.

I completed Baldur's Gate, and rather than moving directly on to BGII discovered Icewind Dale. Having now tried both, I'm still trying to complete Icewind Dale (ironman style - without saves and reloads) having done countless play throughs over probably 2 decades. BGII Gets all the praise, but I start a play through of that once in blue moon and it's never has the same pull that IWD has. And I think that's mostly down to Icewind Dale you can craft your entire party from 1 to 6 characters. Whereas BGII, you make just one character. The story for IWD is also better in my opinion.