The game also sometimes suffers from bad pathfinding; your characters will inevitably split up when you try to make them negotiate the game's many corridors. It's problematic, but if you've played an Infinity engine game before, then chances are you're already used to putting up with it. Fortunately, it's true that while your characters can't run in Icewind Dale, they do move appreciably faster than in Baldur's Gate, but otherwise, the Infinity engine hasn't undergone any significant enhancements to make it better suited for its particular genre. At least Icewind Dale carries over the multiplayer functionality of Baldur's Gate, so you can play the game with up to six people if you can coordinate all the players to work together.

As with both Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate, the limitations of the game engine don't keep Icewind Dale from being a great, original game. In fact, the game's emphasis on combat actually helps a lot of the features in Infinity engine games, like squad formations and fog of war, make more sense. Though the game plays in real time, you have the ability to pause play and reissue move and attack orders at any point, which lets you readily adapt to the changing conditions of battle. Frequently having to pause play might at first seem to disrupt the flow of the game, but you can effectively use the feature to retreat injured party members at the last possible moment, cast certain spells in a pinch, and switch from ranged to melee weapons without delay. Icewind Dale also has an automatic-pause option that simulates turn-based combat by stopping the action in between each short round of battle. In general, no matter how you play it, the combat in Icewind Dale provides a good combination of gory action and interesting tactical opportunity. Since your characters go from first level all the way into their teen levels over the course of the game - a range that's well beyond the scope of most AD&D-based computer games to date - you'll continuously revise your battle tactics as your party increases in power.

Icewind Dale does suffer from a few problems besides the inherent shortcomings of the aging Infinity engine. Although the game doesn't have too many side quests and generally keeps you focused on a particular goal, it does occasionally run into trouble whenever it becomes more open-ended. There are several scripting bugs that may crash the game if you don't do things in the same order the designers intended; you can get into nonsensical dialogue loops with many of the game's nonplayer characters; and the automatic journal-entry feature produces too many convoluted or contradictory entries for it to be useful. Also, the game's handful of puzzles can be frustrating to solve and can slow the game's otherwise brisk pace. Since most of the game's combat sequences are scripted, enemy creatures will attack only once you've triggered them by approaching close enough. Thus you'll find that the game holds few surprises the second time around and also that it's easy to lure just a few enemies at a time in many situations. Furthermore, your characters' moral alignments don't seem to play any part in the game, except to limit them from using certain powerful artifacts - and similarly, your six characters will never actually interact with one another. Although Icewind Dale's gameplay is combat-intensive, the game's interesting story will make you wish your individual characters played a larger role in it.

Ultimately, its story makes Icewind Dale all the more satisfying, and its exciting action makes its occasional problems negligible. There's always a purpose behind all the hacking and slashing, which makes the gameplay seem rewarding and challenging, rather than like a cheap thrill. In this sense, Icewind Dale is surprisingly effective, much like Planescape: Torment managed to be impressive largely on account of its involving plot. Likewise, Icewind Dale proves to be another great addition to Black Isle Studios' roster of high-quality role-playing games. It's well suited for fans of Black Isle Studios' previous games, fans of classic hack-and-slash AD&D computer games, and anyone looking for an action-packed role-playing game with a lot of depth.