If you never played the original Beyond the Ice Palace, you’re probably not alone. The game came out on Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and the ZX Spectrum way back in 1988, received fair-to-middling reviews, and didn’t really inspire much of a following – probably on account of the fact it owed a huge debt to Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which was only a few years old at the time and available on platforms like the NES, which obviously had a much wider reach.
However, it clearly inspired someone at Storybird Studio, because here we are nearly 40 years later, and they’ve seen fit to revive the franchise with Beyond the Ice Palace 2.
Truth be told, I can’t figure out why they decided to bring the game back. It’s not as the name is a huge selling point. Moreover, Beyond the Ice Palace 2 is essentially a Castlevania clone. There’s certainly no shortage of those (or of metroidvanias more broadly) these days, and it’s not as if piggybacking off a game from nearly 40 years ago sets it apart from the competition.
It also doesn’t help that Beyond the Ice Palace 2 doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen many, many times over the past four decades – and it definitely doesn’t do it in a better or more interesting way, which makes it a tough sell. The platforming is fine; seldom too difficult, but basically exactly what you’d expect. The combat is fine; you hack away at skeletons and monsters with weapons that are never as powerful as you’d like. The levels are…not quite fine, since they’re too linear and predictable, but they’re at least functional. Just about the only thing this game does differently from others is have far too few checkpoints, which means that if you die during a boss fight, you usually need to retrace your steps from very early on in the level, which is hardly a point in the game’s favour.
Add it all up, and you’ll be left wondering why Beyond the Ice Palace 2 exists in the first place. You’ve absolutely played plenty of games like this before, and there’s nothing this game has that you can’t find done better elsewhere. Stay tuned to see if they fix any of that in Beyond the Ice Palace 3, which, presumably, will come out sometime around 2060.
PQUBE provided us with a Beyond the Ice Palace 2 PC code for review purposes.
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