Icewind Dale 2 Complete

As IWD 1 of course. These games are Baldur's Gate without good story and quests. Just almost pure combat - which for me is fine. Also, if you want to play this game today - you'll need to do some patching/modding because it will not work on Win10 just on double click on icon... Also, you want to install widescreen patch... Just google a patching guide for this game and then you can calmly fireball everything in your path :)

To be honest it's still a good game, like the rest with the IE games. The really good thing is the implementation of the rules of the D&D 3e. That makes the gameplay fresh and enjoyable. The interface and the graphics are improved, which makes the game very playable even without the EE. It's the first time in an IE game (and the only one) you get some good premade parties with unique stories. It was really fun to play. Oh, and the soundtrack was fun, but still not that epic like in the PS:T or BG. But on the other hand the game copies the problems od IWD1 and makes them kind of worse. The story itself is OK, but let's make that clear - the game is about the combat and exploring the dungeons. Most of the locations are linear and you have to do them one by one. I liked it in the first game, but in IWD2 it just hurt me a lot. These two things make the game very mediocre. You can enjoy it like I did, but not everyone will. To sum up - if you want to try an IE game on the new set of rules - just go for IWD2. If you played the rest of IE games and you still want more - the game is for you. If you want to play just a good cRPG with a great story - you had better (re)play BG2, there is simply no comparison.

Storywise I felt it was quite railroady, but it made up for it with the sheer fun that the near-constant combat made for, the difficulty afforded by HoF mode, the incredible variety of feasible character builds... nearly ten years on and still a favourite

IWD2 is at least as challenging as IWD1 - it has a lot of humor - it laughs at itself at times - If you want to see a good Let's Play of it, check out Master Gradius on youtube. Make a paladin - they get dialogue options other classes do not and they can discern evil intention faster than you can say ogre mage.

Icewind Dale II has proven to be a solid mixture of fun and frustration. If you've enjoyed the original icewind Dale, you'll have fun with it, but it's not the same as it's predecessor. In fact, where Icewind Dale 2 differs is in it's struggle to be more than the original. Surely, a worthy goal for any sequel - take the original, include the things about it that made it good, and add more. Taking the original elements of Icewind Dale, the development team went back to original pen and paper games and took notes on what makes a good pen and paper game so unique and enjoyable. Then, using the proven success of the original, added those wonderful pen and paper elements. Sounds good right? Well, not really. A deep, immersive plot that requires thinking and deductive reasoning to figure out is a key element in a real life D&D game; but when part of a CRPG, it becomes obtuse and wears your patience thin, and usually just is flat out confusing. Puzzles, riddles, and suddenly being forced into a bad situation in a pen and paper game results in amazingly creative solutions that can make your characters real heroes. When it's tried here, the infinity engine just falters and fails, leaving a frustrating situation where you're clueless and looking up walkthroughs to figure out the exact thing the game wants you to do. It gets worse as well - when you get it wrong, and you can get it wrong, you can break the game and prevent forward progress; speaking from experience, I ended up having to either re-start via a very old saved game, give up, or cheat through a level because a key plot element wasnt working because i missed a 'trigger' somewhere that flagged a variable the game needed to proceed. It all sounds bleak, I know. But not everyong runs into issues, and maybe you wont. But in general, you'll likely have periods of the same fun you had in IWD, broken up by forced puzzles that arent much fun at best, and frustrating at worst. For IWD fans, still recommended.