Icewind Dale 2 Complete

I have fond memories of this game as a great and moody Infinity Engine game. But...no, it is a painful and annoying game using many ugly tricks to make it harder and hardcore dungeon crawling. It starts out strong I think, very mood in Targos but the longer you play, the more it start to collapse and show its uglier and less polished side. Lot of irritating puzzles, irritating traps, really wicked spawns out of nowhere. Pathfinding being hellish. With my nostalgia glasses off, oh hell. This game does not hold up to my teenage memories and it is a pain to get running. I had to fiddle with the ini files, deleting a string! I do not even remember which. The only game I say would do super well with an enhanced edition. Which it of course just got! As im almost done some modders released an enhanced edition. Just my damn luck. But it is the last Infinity Engine came if I do not count the Luremaster downloadable expansion for IWD I, that I need to finish to have finished them all. If you'rea really starving for infinity engine games! This is more of the same in DnD 3,5 with some pretty nasty and annoying choices by the devs. But Infinity Engine in 3,5 is a bit interesting. But not at all how I remember it in most places. Losing its charm after the Targos chapters.

I never was a fan of Icewind Dale. I remember abandoning the game after playing it for a while. It was shortly after it first came out and I had just finished Baldur's Gate and expected more: more story, more immersiveness and less linearity. It felt like a hack'n'slay-game in comparison. Now I decided to give Icewind Dale 2 a try and am quite happy with it. The combat is tough and very strategic. The amount of sidequests is just right and so is the layout of the different areas. It just almost never gets boring. It is still true, though, that, like its predecessor, it lacks the open world that Baldur's Gate offered. Somewhat like Neverwinter Nights 2, the game and it's storyline more or less run on rails and it is almost impossible to derail the whole thing. But while I disliked this fact about Neverwinter Nights 2, I actually like it about Icewind Dale 2. It never gives you the feeling of being forced to do something when you acutally want to do something else. Its like every curve of the railroad seems reasonable, every change of speed justified, every stop just in time. This is a hard thing to accomplish in game-design, I assume! Even apart from that, the storytelling is good: You have to act like a hero at times, but on other occasion, you need to make questionable decisions. All of them seemed natural enough for me. This adds to the overall atmosphere of the game and makes the story believable. I didn't finde any obvious flaws. It's challenging but well balanced, polished, well thought-out, features an intriguing enough story and runs reasonably well even on newer machines. If anything, it is time-consuming as it is surprisingly long. What starts of as a simple mercenary mission step by step becomes a deep story with some surprising twists. I would compare the game to the german title Drakensang, which is somewhat reminiscient of it here and there - and is equally long and winding.

The nostalgia hits hard, waited for years for someone, somehow, to rescue this when I heard the source code was lost. The fact some industrious superheroes rebuilt it from the ashes makes it even more amazeballs. Plays flawlessly on a modern system. Now my BG/IWD/NWN collection is complete again, all is well in the Forgotten Realms.

Still a great game. Thanks to GOG holds up on newer systems!

Fun. A little old-school game that calls me back to my younger days of playing rpgs.