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.
As someone who never played this series back when it originally released, I didnt have any nostalgia to draw on. I never went back to try Dungeon Seige, until now. These comments are based on what's here and will not dwell on any expansion packs missing, and is from a new player's point of view. The gameplay in DS is simple; fight through the world and experience it as you go. In between each level, or at times at various points in each level, a little bit of storyline appears. It's just enough story to remind you there is more to the world than monsters and beasts to fight, but only just. The story is threadbare at best, but frankly story is not why you find yourself drawn to continue playing. What does draw you in is seeing the different landscapes of the levels unfold, watching the different kinds of enemies appear, new gear and waiting for the all too infrequent shopkeeper. Comparing stats, making judgement calls on fast vs slow weapons, finding out what spells work well, and micromanaging your inventory is all part of the recipie that seems to have something within it that kept me coming back, despite it's seeming simplicity. It is after all, not that complex; unlike Icewind Dale or Baldurs Gate, where the depth and sometimes confusing rules of the D&D core set wind themselves deep into the game, in Dungeon Siege they didnt forcibly port a ruleset over. They just made their own that scaled and worked well as a PC game; I wont bore you with details here, but there is distinction between classes and roles that make each character interesting and fun to develop. At times there are too many enemines and too long of levels - you do get bored on occasion. The combat is enjoyable and can have strategy, but at it's core it is about feeling powerful as your characters blow through enemies. It was a fun game and has aged well; good for late in the evening when your mind just needs a distraction - preferrably nothing heavy. Recommended at sale prices.
Let's get straight to it - should you buy this? Yes. I would buy it again, and I didnt get it during a sale. Now, to the details. As one who's played Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale multiple times over, this game was very exiciting to see - an old school classic style of game with modern sensibilities and better resolution and graphics. Sure enough, it's just those things. Things that were a struggle with Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale is typically done better in Pillars. Inventory is easier to deal with; getting around just to cross a map is more friendly. Pixelated sprites now have detail. Poor pathfinding is better; constant reloading to learn spells or rest without getting interrupted are gone. Combat can be easy or complex and deep. All these things and more make Pillars in many ways less stressful and more fun. However ... and it's an unavoidable however - the plot, the writing, and the lore is much worse. First, the plot device itself by nature means you're listening to everyone else's story, rather than feeling like you're the one that's making history. Secondarily, it's wierd - it's just difficult to follow and understand as the lore is convoluted and strange, and the plot is heavily integrated into the lore. It's not character centric - it's WORLD centric, and it's just too big an ask. Third, and worst of all - the writing is excessive. Verbose to the maximum. Rathter than saying "Steve walks across the room" - Pillars says something like: "Steve saunters lazily accross a velvet carpet market with vivid colors and wild patterns, passing columns of books also of equally rich and pristine quality. He looks around casually and finally locks eyes on you." I appreciate they are trying to make everything more interesting, but as a video game the writing is very poorly executed. By the end I was so fed up with the purple prose I was skipping huge swaths of text. Recommended; but know your patience with the writing wont last.
Polished, engaging, interesting, challenging, immersive. Battletech's improvement on the Mechwarrior game series of old is it's ability to keep you engaged in the galaxy as a whole and the stories and history of your pilots and crew. Turn based strategy based, it leverages the genre in an excellent manner. The controls are precise and easy to use, easy to understand, simple enough to pickup intuitively without much in the way of tutorials. What's fantastic is that despite the ease, it's still complex and deep gameplay. The battles themselves have a large number of considerations to think about as you plan that perfect strategy to take out your enemies or break into the base. The depth of the strategy means even after going on 20+ hours of gameplay now, even the simplest of missions aren't tiresome. Outside of combat, you have lots to do on your ship itself, including RPG elements in a wonderfully made art style, choice driven dialog and one of the absolute BEST implementations of helping players understand lore behind the universerve they are playing in. Pop up boxes explain names, places and more as you progress. If I were to nit-pick, in a perfect world it would have a quicksave, and when there are a large number of units in a battle or a convoy, waiting for everyone to take their turn takes a lot of time. Overall however, this game harkens back to the golden era of 90's PC gaming when developers and designers weren't focused on loot boxes and cash grabs; rather to make the best game they possibly could - when I play battletech, I really feel like it was made by people who wanted to create something... special.
