Gameplay Overview

And A New Story

Icewind Dale II is set a generation after the original Icewind Dale. Indeed, there are numerous references to the original game, from various NPCs telling amusing, abridged versions of your previous exploits, to returning to old haunts such as Kuldahar and Dragon’s Eye. The Prologue unloads you quite unceremoniously into Targos off of a ship named the Wicked Wench, into the middle of an impending goblin invasion. What ought to be a fairly accommodating introduction chapter is instead one of the most difficult areas in an Infinity-engine game if your party is not well-constructed. Unlike past RPGs from Black Isle or BioWare, Icewind Dale II is notoriously stingy with its magical items early-game, forcing you scavenge from goblin corpses and barbarian merchants in order to have a fighting chance against the invaders. Being placed in the middle of an invasion could be a thrilling start to a game, but Black Isle's IWD2 squanders this opportunity and the game, unfortunately, never manages to completely take off or exhibit the urgency that BioWare's Baldur’s Gate II did.

A Pleasant Resort

A Warm Welcome

Giants and Spiders

The game begins in the docks which have been overrun by goblins. After exterminating the pests, the remainder of the chapter devolves into fetch-and-run errand quests. Though this is an easy way of gaining experience, it does a poor job of preparing newer players for the rigorous boss battles to come. From there, the game turns into a fairly conventional dungeon crawl. The original Icewind Dale, despite harboring no illusions that it was anything but a hack n’ slash adventure, usually had a very strong adherence to the storyline, giving a fairly logical and significant reason for each set of encounters and goals. Icewind Dale II, unfortunately, feels as though it forces the player through encounters for the reason that it’s a dungeon crawl, rather than intermingling plot and gameplay.

Sumptuous, Yet Recycled Atmosphere

The graphics in Icewind Dale II, in many aspects, surpass the overwhelmingly high, near-artbook standards established in the original. This time around, the landscapes have a much grittier, harsher look to them, while the new portraits have a substantial helping of abstract surrealism, much like the original Planescape artwork in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The new monster models look noticeably better than those taken directly from Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, such as Hook Horrors, Half-Dragons, and Ferys. The creature graphics are larger, exhibit more frames of animation, and move more realistically than Black Isle’s earlier models (which they tend to generally recycle through their games).

Shifty Gnomes

Farewell, Captain Yurst

Rabid Puppy-Dogs

Though the new graphic work in Icewind Dale II does an admirable job of keeping the Infinity-engine looking decently modern, it too seems as though the developers were giving an aging model a half-hearted makeover. Regardless of any way you cut it, it appears as though a good number of the models, portraits, and textures are simply re-used from earlier previous games without hardly any touch-up work given to them. Back in the days of the original Baldur’s Gate, the graphics looked fantastic, but it’s been nearly five years from then, and we’re still seeing the exact same model and animation from the goblins. In addition, the 32 new portraits for Icewind Dale II just feel inadequate given the sudden wealth of sub-race options. One such example of this is the inclusion of only three drow portraits. It’s hardly contested that Black Isle is one of the 2D powerhouses of the PC gaming industry; given its close ties with Wizards of the Coast, one can only feel let down at the relative lack of options considering the resources Black Isle could presumably draw upon.