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Icewind Dale - Review |
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Hack and Slash Goodness
By: Souma
Review Breakdown |
Battle System |
9 |
Interface |
8 |
Music/Sound |
7 |
Originality |
7 |
Plot |
6 |
Localization |
n/a |
Replay Value |
10 |
Visuals |
8 |
Difficulty |
Hard |
Time to Complete |
40-100 Hours |
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Overall |
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Criteria |
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It all began with Baldur's Gate and it's expansion Tales of the Sword
Coast. It continued with Planescape: Torment. And now, with a little help from producer
and developer Black Isle Studios (a division of Interplay), the Bioware Infinity engine
has spawned Icewind Dale. It would be ludicrous to declare Icewind Dale to be
totally original. It isn't. It reuses a game engine used in two previous games and the
famous 2nd Edition AD&D set of rules used by pen and paper roleplayers all around the
world for 12 years previous. However, it does grab your attention by bringing the game
engine closer to the full 2nd Edition AD&D rules (compared to Baldur's Gate and
Planescape: Torment). It then firmly grabs you by the throat by throwing in a whole bunch
of new spells, items and monsters, nicer graphics, new background music and an expanded
range of character sounds. In other words, it doesn't take any steps backwards.
Billed as a dungeon hack, Icewind Dale has delivered as promised. The
dungeons are deep and atmospheric. The battles are intense and strategic. The battle
system in Icewind Dale is the same system seen in Baldur's Gate with few modifications.
Exploration is integrated smoothly with combat, taking place on the same map in real-time
with the ability to give orders at any time and pause at any time. On the other hand,
movement rates have been increased by 50%, allowing characters and monsters to get around
faster. This was a real problem in Baldur's Gate where you could often wander around for
many minutes without running into anything at all and monsters would crawl forwards as you
peppered them with missile fire. Fortunately your range of vision has been extended with
the game using up to 800x600 resolution so you won't be caught flat-footed any more than
in previous games. You can now access the inventory screen without the game unpausing,
allowing you to take the time to use your equipment to the best of your advantage during
combat. This is important as there are a great number of items in the game and having the
right item to hand in every situation is nearly impossible. Now you can have your neat
item and use it too.
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Burn baby, burn! |
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The interface is solid with most screens available directly from the main
game screen by buttons and by hot keys. The main commands are all accessible at the bottom
of the main game screen and vary depending on whether you are selecting a single character
or several (character or party). You can streamline the use of many abilities and spells
by assigning hot keys for them in a special configuration screen. Targeting is the simple
point and click affair common to the PC and mouses. Moving around has become much easier
as the path searching AI has become smarter and will actually move obstructing players out
of the way and then back thus allowing you to get into formation with a minimum of fuss.
The only real gripe about the interface is the lack of some way to leave a dungeon
speedily. If you need to resupply or simply get back out after completing a dungeon, you
will have to trek all the way back to the surface on foot. A shame considering there is no
real reason why it should be this way. Monsters do not block your path by respawning
randomly so you travel freely (if tediously) in previously explored areas.
As you create your entire party yourself from scratch with no set leader
and no npcs joining the party later in the game, there really is no room for character
development. The only exception to this rule is a sparse few npcs who are central to the
plot itself. The plot itself is very linear, very solid and only does what it needs to do
in order to progres the game. Basically, it directs you from one dungeon to the next and
lets you know why you are trying to kill everything in sight and take their stuff. After
that, most additional information is found in journals and books found in dungeons and in
short conversations with tall angry monsters just before they attack. This is quite
refreshing after dozens of games where the battle system is pretty much secondary to the
story that is being told. There are a few moments where the game doesn't quite make clear
exactly what you need to do next, but luckily it doesn't usually take too long to find out
anyhow.
FMV is almost non-existent in the game, but this allowed the designers to
pack the entire game onto just two CDs so it is quite forgivable. On the other hand, there
are many hundreds of beautifully animated monsters and spell effects. Giants tower over
the party members ominously, beetles scuttle, spells crackle with energy. The menus, item
icons and character dolls have all received a sprucing up. Even a simple long sword is
more detailed than the same seen in Baldur's Gate. The background is in the same
hand-drawn style that has been so successful with all of Black Isle Studios previous rpgs
and with Baldur's Gate, but with the most attention to detail I have seen thus far.
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Fire Fetish? |
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Sound is used to good effect. In haunted dungeons the ambient sound gives
the impression that it has been uninhabited for hundreds of years. In the fortress of the
arch villain, the music reprises the introduction to Baldur's Gate, giving you a
foreboding sense of crumbling architecture and impending doom. On a wind swept glacier, a
tune reminiscent of something from Fallout II gives you an impression of wind and the
feeling of extreme isolation. In dank caverns, there is the constant drip of water and the
occasional sound of something in the distance. The music is in general quite subtle and
unless you are paying close attention you will hardly notice it is there. This is good as
the overall feel of the game is quite dark and you don't want to be bopping along in the
middle of an undead tomb! The sounds of fighting are quite good too. Each monster has it's
own range of sounds as do the various weapon types you can use. Monsters slaver and scream
appropriately when they die. Due to the small amount of important characters in the game
(no more than a dozen) the designers were able to get the lines of each of these fully
spoken. This is quite nice and much better than Baldur's Gate where everyone from normal
townspeople to Elminster were stuck with only a few lines. Possibly the worst part of the
sounds are the relatively limited range of sounds for characters. While there are quite a
few "mage" and "fighter" sound sets and a couple "thief"
sound sets, the rest of the classes are largely unrepresented and the player is forced to
make do or create their own.
The casual gamer with little or no experience with the AD&D rules will
not be able to just leap in to Icewind Dale and learn as they go. Even the first fight you
get in can be deadly if you have no idea what you are doing. It's quite embarrassing to
lose a member of your strong brave band of fledgling adventures to a small pack of a dozen
goblins or a couple wolves. Arguably, the game would have benefited from some sort of
training quest that would give a complete novice enough practice with the interface to
know what they are doing. However, this game was designed to be challenging and exciting
and it provides. There are very few points in the game where you will feel you are
breezing through. If you fail to pay attention you will get in trouble so you won't find
yourself falling asleep during battles. The major villains of the game are strong enough
that you can easily fail to defeat them without a plan of attack and even then you may
come very close to losing or be surprised by some new trick. On the other hand, it is far
from impossible as even a poorly designed party can win out in the end.
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Can't these guys stay dead? |
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The replay value of Icewind Dale is the highest of any rpg I have ever
come across. While some magical items are set (spell scrolls from which mages can learn
new spells are limited very carefully for instance) there are dozens of places in the game
where items are randomly selected from a set group of items. So each time you play it all
over, you have every chance of finding some new item to try out. On top of this, you have
all the technicalities of trying to craft the perfect party and trying out every different
class and race available. While the standard console rpg generally allows you to try out
nearly everything the first time through, Icewind Dale wisely leaves you with something
else to try the next time around. And the time after that. And then some more. Currently
on my third time through, I look forward to returning to Icewind Dale a few times more to
try new parties and see what new challenges face me and what new strategies I can develop.
Being a completist and a careful planner, this game took me around 100
hours to complete the first time. On my next time through, I reduced that time
considerably, but still found it took around 70 hours to finish. I suspect that something
around 40 hours would be the minimum time you could slash your way through in. Icewind
Dale is a very polished game that will challenge you at every turn and show you something
different each time you play. |