ICY: Frostbite Edition

 PC
Metascore
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No score yet - based on 2 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2
  1. The Overpowered Noobs
    Aug 29, 2017
    70
    ICY: Frostbite Edition takes you hostage with a compelling narrative rife with tragedy, mystery, treachery, and danger. With an extensive variety of story arcs, endings, and random encounters, IFE offers excellent replayability.
  2. GameSpew
    Aug 14, 2017
    50
    ICY: Frostbite Edition is a distinctly average title. It definitely has its moments, particularly when you stumble into the game’s stranger locations and end up having to deal with a colossal mutant tree or similar horror. Plus, never knowing whether you’re “right” is a wonderfully unsettling sensation. But you’re still left with a narrative that fails to draw you in, an oddly out of place combat system and a superficial survival mechanic, making gameplay middling at best.

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User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. PublicNuisance
    Sep 19, 2020
    8
    I had never played the original ICY before the Frostbite Edition overhauled a lot of features and fixed bugs. Luckily as a previous owner II had never played the original ICY before the Frostbite Edition overhauled a lot of features and fixed bugs. Luckily as a previous owner I got the Frostbite Edition as a free upgrade which was a classy move by the developer.

    I went in expecting it to be mostly a visual novel with some light strategy parts but came to find it was the opposite with most of the game play being the strategy and the light parts being the visual novel aspects. That isn’t a knock against the game, more just my experience and expectations. The game begins with your band of nomads being kidnapped . You and a few others escape and from there want to free your other friends but first you must gather equipment; recruit new allies and find the kidnappers. The game is both surprisingly deep in it’s strategy and options as well as being, for the most part, very easy to get into. You can scavenge and hunt for a variety of items that can be equipped; sold or be used for crafting. The crafting process is very straight forward and you can find or purchase guides to show you different combinations for items. You can use skill points to boost a variety of skills to suit pretty much any play style you want. The combat system took some getting to used to as you have to experiment and keep an eye on what combinations of different abilities will work well given the weapons you’re using. The more people in your party means the more of these abilities you get as the more weapons you have. Strangely how much inventory you can carry doesn’t increase as you add more people to your party which didn’t make much sense. You have to manage having enough food to feed your party as well as having medical supplies to heal their wounds suffered during combat. You also need to have bullets not just to shoot them during combat but they are also the in game currency of the wasteland. This means the more you spend the less you can shoot at people in a firefight. I had a few issues with the game though. I wish you were able to heal your party members during a fight but to be fair that wasn’t a major issue outside of the end fight. As it is you can only heal outside of combat. You can’t change the difficulty once you start so keep that in mind. If you are in a dialogue screen you can’t access the menu so if you want to quit the game all of a sudden you have to either Alt-F4 to quit the game or see it through until the conversation is done. The map was also poorly done. Your objectives were marked with a small question mark on the map but that was hard to see sometimes and also didn’t tell em which objective it was. If I have a few quests open I am going to have a few question marks and if you want to do your quests in a a specific order well good luck with figuring out which is which. Sometimes the game would describe the location as “south of the garden” or “by the wind tower” but that wasn’t always very accurate. The sound effects and music were well done. There was a great deal of choices to make near the end of the game and you could have a good amount of say in how the game ended based on that. Throughout the middle of the game there weren’t as many dialogue options. The art was above average. The battles themselves didn’t have a lot of animation to them but the backgrounds and land were decent.

    I played ICY: Frostbite Edition on Linux. It never crashed on me but did have a couple technical issues. One time the game launched to a white screen and just stayed there each time I launched the game. Restarting Steam and relaunching the game fixed it and I never saw that issue again. Sometimes when I saved the game it would kick me back to the main menu and I would have to launch the save file I just made in order to continue. The game allowed me to save anytime I wanted outside of combat and conversations. There are six save game slots. The game uses the Unity engine. I played version 1.1.6772.34059 of the game. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There are no graphics options for the game. I didn’t notice any spelling errors.

    Disk Space Used: 976MB
    Engine: Unity
    Save System: Manual (Outside of combat and dialogue)

    VRAM Usage: 727-851 MB
    CPU Usage: 2-8 %
    2.5-3.4 GB

    Overall I found myself enjoying ICY. The story is interesting; the salvage and upgrade mechanics are well done; the combat is interesting; and there is a good amount of choice overall. The few technical blemishes didn’t ruin the game for me. I finished the game in 8 hours 31 minutes on the normal difficulty setting. I paid $3.49 CAD for ICY and feel that is great value. The current price it goes for of $13.99 CAD is still a good deal for what you get. If you enjoy some strategy and planning to your game without it becoming masochistic then you should try it out.

    My Score: 8.5/10

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.1.7 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.8.6-1-MANJARO    … Full Review »
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