Heart of Winter's story is based on a minor detail introduced in Icewind Dale. Basically, your party is asked to travel further north and help bring about peace between some powerful barbarian tribes and the nearby community of the Ten-Towns. Soon, you discover evil at the source of the problem--and so you must finally put an end to this vengeful villain.

In doing so, you can either export your characters from Icewind Dale or start afresh with pregenerated high-level characters designed for use with the expansion. The original Icewind Dale was also released last year--actually, only a couple of months before Baldur's Gate II. Since it used BioWare's enduring Infinity engine and bore the Dungeons & Dragons license, some players were skeptical about the game: They feared that it was quickly put together to distract them until Baldur's Gate II's release. Fortunately, that wasn't the case.

Icewind Dale turned out to be a fun-filled, distinctively action-packed role-playing game that shared only a superficial similarity to other Infinity-engine games. Unfortunately, the official expansion to Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter, is exactly the sort of product that Black Isle fans were worried Icewind Dale might turn out to be. It's a short-lived, uninspired addition to Icewind Dale that costs nearly as much as the original game did and requires that you have the original installed; yet it offers only a fraction of Icewind Dale's value.

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter Tech Info
Publisher: Interplay
Developer: Black Isle Studios
Genre: Role-Playing
ESRB: TEEN
Copy Protection:
StarForce software protection technology contained in one or more versions of this game.

Game Information
Number of Players: 1-6







Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 233 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 15 MB
Hard Drive Space: 300 MB