Icewind Dale

The Good
The first thing I noticed about this game was that there is much more fighting and much less talking going on. I thought it might just be part of the beginning of the game but I was wrong, its basically an all-out hack-n-slash fest through the whole game. Its packed with tons of magical weapons, armors and items to aid you in battle, which you almost always seem to be in. It was a nice break from the 2000 page novel that you basically read by the time you finished Baldur's Gate 2. It had a decent story line where it basically left you chasing evil through out Icewind Dale searching for the source of the evil consuming the region. Lots of weird twists and turns, allows you to play an evil character with a fair degree of accuracy. Some choices such as allowing the girl-thief to escape the ice salamander lair with the slaves results in a large amount of EXP but if you side with the salamanders and kill her and the slaves, you can get a ton more EXP. Lots of good choices to keep the replay value high. Many good spells, allows you to advance your mages from 1st to 9th level casting.

The Bad
The fact that it was an all out kill fest meant that there wasn't going to be many towns. Even near the end of the game you found yourself having to wander 8 days back to Kuldahar to buy weapons that were barely good at first level. There is a good weapons dealer near Upper Dorns Deep but you have to walk through many screens to get there, it takes too long. The shops always sell the same thing and eventually become useless except for a place to get rid of junk. I hate the way in Kuldahar (which is basically the only town besides Easthaven) you have to wander from shop to shop because each shop only buys specific items. It becomes a hassle, I started just dropping equipment just to save myself the hassle of trying to sell the junk.

A thief is a must in these games, I can't stand the way that this game doesn't give your thief EXP for disarming traps. Of Course a thief should get EXP for it.

Like all of the Infinity-Engine games from Black Isle, the AI makes your characters border-line retarded. Sometimes they walk in to each other, even obvious paths to a destination cause them to get confused and end up walking a completely longer path. It gets a little better if you find a few boots of speed to separate them a little bit but the AI is still pretty bad. The scripting is a joke, I set my cleric to a Passive-Fighter and my cleric just stood there and casted bless over and over and over. I don't like the scripting. Gold is basically worthless in the game, except you spend so long saving for 1 really expensive item thats not that good anyways. You find pretty much everything that is good in the game. No resolution adjustment either, crappy 640X480 only. I couldn't figure out how to reassign the "SELECT ALL" key which is the Plus key, out of all the keys you could reassign, it won't let you reassign the most important hotkey in my opinion.
The game is fairly short compared to Baldur's Gate 2 but its still long enough though.

The Bottom Line
Definitely worth a try if you like the BG series. A great buy for only about 20 bucks not days too!

The Good
Released roughly at the same time as Diablo II, Icewind Dale was Black Isle's effort to present a deeper alternative to simplistic action-based combat in role-playing games, at the same time not shying away from basing a game on simple dungeon crawling. In reality, Icewind Dale is much closer to old AD&D Gold Box games than to Diablo: it focuses on party management and tactical combat much more heavily than on character customization and item-collecting.

The game deliberately distances itself from its "older brother" Baldur's Gate, being much less story-driven and much more combat-heavy. While it's easy to dismiss it at first as a dull plot-less version of Baldur's Gate, the fact is that Icewind Dale excels in other areas. It is closer to Might and Magic in that party creation and subsequent management is in the spotlight, and the addictive fun comes from all those countless combinations you can achieve by creating your ultimate band of heroes. Neither Baldur's Gate, nor any other RPG of the "Renaissance" era (or any other that was based on Ultima, for that matter) allowed you to do that. You lose character sub-plots and inter-party bantering, but gain more control and deeper role-playing of your own characters.

AD&D rules are quite restrictive, so character creation cannot compare to, say, that of post-sixth Wizardry games, let alone the obsessive depth of Darklands, which makes Icewind Dale a less intimidating, but still reasonably hardcore RPG. It is very easy to get into and start playing. You won't be humiliatingly beaten during your first battle just because you failed to do some complex math while creating your spellcaster, but your ability to manage your party will be challenged at all times.

The main fun in the game comes from combat. Hands down, Icewind Dale has one of the best combat systems around, mixing tactical thinking and reflexes in just the right proportions. The balancing is frankly better than in any other Infinity engine game, and the difficulty level is just right. Preparation, positioning, movement, delicate balance of buffing, status ailments, offensive and defensive spells - everything plays a role, and is a joy to experiment with.

While Icewind Dale is a linear game, its dungeons, where most of it takes place, are quite large. The game also has marvelous old-fashioned 2D graphics that convey plenty of atmosphere. You won't be stuck in depressing mazes that look all the same - you'll be gradually advancing through haunting, lovingly detailed areas, accompanied by a sweet soundtrack starting with the unforgettable "Nordic" theme of the game's opening location.

Even though there are very few friendly areas or characters to talk to in the game, what little there is of the dialogue is surprisingly well-written, and almost every conversation is a pleasure to read.

The Bad
If you expect a large world, exploration, plenty of choices, interaction with many NPCs, etc., you won't find any of that here. This is a simple dungeon crawler with forgiving dungeons; it's not a game of exploration, but rather a game that throws lots of enemies at you and not much else. It's as basic as it gets: receive a quest, clear area A, proceed to area B, receive another quest, rinse and repeat. You must do everything in a particular order and only go where you are told to.

The game is very linear, the main quests are always the same and you have very few sub-quests - actually, no sub-quests worth mentioning. The story is paper-thin: there are a couple of nice twists, but the plot isn't very involving and is also quite slow-moving. You can't decide almost anything during the game, you'll have to kill everybody you are supposed to kill, and you can't kill anybody you are not supposed to kill.

In short, Icewind Dale is a throwback - a well-executed one, but a throwback nevertheless. Your final evaluation of this game would entirely depend on how much you like to see a fairly primitive, simple crawler revitalized with a superb engine.

The Bottom Line
Ease of playing, fantastically balanced combat, and addictive party-building make Icewind Dale a good, solid RPG; but it still feels somewhat too streamlined, too accommodated to the preferences of modern impatient players. I find Baldur's Gate games much more compelling in every way.

The Good
For players that have been around since the first AD&D rpg's, a dream come true is when you actually see what those spells are good for in battle. This game is one of the long lists of that made that happen (finally burning touch has its uses..hehehe).

The real-time combat was excellent, fast and rough (you'll discover later that there are some real-time combat of of future AD&D stink...ehem...like the 3D Pool of Radiance).

The graphics were astounding, although I don't recall there was a very good intro, like Diablo? Then again, who can compare the graphics of Diablo...HA!

The Bad
There was something that I was EXTREMELY disturbed about the game, which is probably the only reason I bothered to review this game anyway.

THE LANGUAGE! My God, I do recall some kind nasty lines (although optional), that some of the characters (your) leader could say, if you chose that. Hey, I know, your characters could be chaotic evil, but this is a GAME, where KIDS play, and this is not something a AD&D game should introduce: Foul Language, its bad for the morals, mate. An -E grade for "Soul" for the creators of this game!

The Bottom Line
Nice, if you don't mind the language...