On face value, Icewind Dale is a good game. More or less the same D&D rules of Baldur's Gate, a brilliant soundtrack, a storyline that ticks most fantasy boxes, a wide variety of enemies and inviting environments. The premise of creating your own party and setting them on a dungeon crawl is promising, and the audio visual quality of the game, which really is top rate, offers an immersive experience. It should by all accounts be a good game. Sadly the experience is not what I would have expected. To say "it's the little things that count" is particularly fitting of Icewind Dale. There is no one, significant issue with the game, or detrimental game mechanic. It's simply plagued with a plethora of minor issues, which eventually become the straw that breaks the camels back. Only there are several straws. In this summary (not a full review), I'll try to describe some of the problems, in a way the reader can hopefully understand. I don't want to outright bash this game, because I actually enjoy it. I just want to offer some balance in light of the many flawless reviews this game has. Much of the frustration comes from simple design. It's not that the game design is especially poor, just conceived without proper foresight. Lets start with resting. You need to rest frequently in this game, fair enough. But the game takes the piss by imposing irrational decisions on where it will let you sleep. Can I sleep in this scary dungeon? No. Can I sleep in this perfectly safe room? No. You have to back track to another scary dungeon the game deems appropriate. This just wastes time, it serves no game play function whatsoever. What's worse is the game applies this rule with no regularity or sense of logic. Take the AI's ability to move efficiently from A to B. Characters will often walk in the wrong direction, get stuck, travel half-way then change their mind and go elsewhere, take the longest route possible, or simply not move at all. This is forgiveable in itself, and doesn't occur all the time. But in a game that requires such a large amount of backtracking through large environments, it becomes increasingly frustrating. You'll inevitably waste a lot of time backtracking and hand-holding your characters. Looting and selling. You'll often get a lot of loot in dungeons, more than you can carry. Which again means you have to backtrack, often travelling through several levels of a dungeon. When you get to town, the shops are spread apart, and again the AI often has trouble navigating. So you sell your stuff, then walk all the way back out of town and through several levels of the dungeon to get back to the next battle. Rinse and repeat. The end result of the above points is that the game is ridiculously long for no good reason. I probably spend a third of my time, resting, finding a place to rest, backtracking, helping stuck AI and selling. Having to deal with little problems is fine initially, but becomes a serious bug bear after many hours of play. The gameplay itself is unforgiving. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even on easy it will probably provide ample challenge for most gamers. The problem is it just drags on, and on, and on, and on. You don't just fight some tough enemies, you fight small armies... on numerous occasions. Typically you'll buff your characters, maybe scout ahead, fight a battle or two, have to rest (which at times means backtracking again), then repeat. Do that half a dozen times and you'll complete the level of the dungeon. It can take a week of in game time, resting and fighting to work your way through a floor. If you are hoping for something to break up the action, like narrative, you are out of luck. Despite my personal opinion being that the old D&D rules have not aged all that well , the combat is quite enjoyable. The entire focus of the game is combat, so it's just as well it is. It just drags on too long, way too long, It's hard to play the game for more than a couple of hours as it eventually becomes an exercise in repetition without any feeling of achievement. Some people have noted the importance of using tactics and formation in this game, the thing is it just doesn't always work. Formations only work on the occasions you can actually bottleneck the enemy. On some occasions they will actively pursue your fleeing mage/archer, oblivious to the rest of your party, running after them and stabbing them in the back. I could go into other minor details, but really it's simply a case of issues related the D&D rules. Specifically trying to include too much in one game. All of this is held together by a very poor story. It starts out ok, but after doing a couple of dungeons, you'll soon lose interest and realise it's not worth wasting even more time reading the text. The pacing is bad, the plot points are not really plausible, the dialogue options are usually a mix of predictable crap and a crazy joker option, and any notion of choice is virtually redundant as most of the game is simply solved with violence and/or leads to the same result. There is no character development, no believable motivation and in conclusion, the story is about as unrewarding as things come. Icewind Dale's plot is paper thin, and delivered at a pace so slow, they almost encourage you to analyse how poor each new 'revelation' really is. So... conclusion? You may think I hate the game after seeing my score and reading all this. But no. I have simply chosen to focus on negatives as other reviews discuss the prettier points in ample detail. Icewind Dale, is not an exercise in frustration. But it is an exercise in doing everything enjoyable to the point of boredom. If the game was half as long, most of the issues would not be so prevalent, and I would have rated it one higher. As it stands, the game is a lengthy, monotonous dungeon crawl, framed by a terrible story, which offers very little sense of accomplishment. It's not a bad game, just an average game that maybe tries too hard.
