Beyond the Ice Palace II – PS5 Review

Beyond the Ice Palace II is quite the relic. The first game came out in 1988 on our beloved Speccy, the Commodore 64, Alan Sugar’s turdbox plus the Amiga and the Atari ST. Published by Elite Systems, formerly Richard Wilcox Software, they’ll be more familiar to contemporary gamers due to his brother, Steve Wilcox’s shenanigans a little over ten years ago with the Recreated ZX Spectrum Kickstarter.  This didn’t end too well as you may recall.

Anyway, they were specialists in porting popular arcade games to the home computers of the day, with the likes of Commando, Buggy Boy, Space Harrier and significantly, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins. This is where Beyond The Ice Palace came into being, being Elite’s take on a sequel, referring to the end of the home version of Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins which ended in an ice level. Except Capcom wouldn’t give them their blessing to make a proper sequel, so instead Elite went and did their own thing. So far, so wild west of gaming.

All of which brings us lurching into the harsh daylight of thirty-seven years later, which begs the question, why have French dev Storybird Studio seen fit to resurrect this ancient licence so long after the fact. We can only guess that someone in the studio really loved it back in the day or has been revisiting old Amiga games via emulation.

Has it been worth the wait then? Well, yes and no. We guess for big fans of the original, all their Christmases came at once. For anyone else, ourselves included, you’ll likely never have heard of the original game, nor thought it warranted a sequel. As well as the fact that this is hardly the height of graphical sophistication, everything on display here was put to shame technically by the likes of Shadow of the Beast. Never mind the PS5 knocks the Amiga into a cocked hat. We’d expect a little more flourish rather than the frankly GBA level design evident here.

Your character, the formerly powerful king is also quite the blank cipher. In a fairly sumptuous introduction, you’re given some background story about a magical arrow that imbues you with powers. Only for reasons, your character is weakened and left for dead. It’s the same old story, evil has taken over the kingdom, subjugated all your subjects and laid waste to any centres of population. Except you then wake up and are out to seek revenge.

Another factor that also doesn’t help, is the lukewarm platforming. Your jump is ineffective at best. When you reach the end of a platform, you don’t grab hold of the edge and mantle up as you might expect. Instead, you’ll likely fall right through and end up on the ground. What you actually need to do is jump, then hit jump once again at the apex of your jump to trigger the mantling mechanic. All very counterintuitive, not to mention poorly explained at the outset. Hardly great for a game in which platforming is pivotal.

What immediately struck us, is how damn slow your character is. The only way to move with any level of urgency is to dash and even then, that’s limited by your stamina bar. For a Metroidvania there’s not much in the way of incremental upgrades, to the extent that when you beat your first significant boss and gain a magic arrow fragment, nothing happens. At all. You’re still as weak and enfeebled as you are at the outset. It takes quite a while before you are arbitrarily given access to the double jump that helps a little with the platforming, but not much.

Enemies are generic at best beginning with regenerating skeletons who crumble to the ground after a few attacks from you that you then have to dispatch with a heavy attack. If you take a hit though, certainly in the early stages at least, you have no way of replenishing your health without backtracking to a prior checkpoint. No quality-of-life concessions here like health bars or health consumables at the point where you’re learning how to play Beyond the Ice Palace II. Oh no, you have to ironman it like you’re renowned hockey player Phil Kessel.  Yes, if you retrace your steps to a checkpoint, you’ll deposit whatever meagre earnings you’ve earned in the bank.

But the best part, is when you get to the infrequently placed shops, once you’ve cleared their shelves, there’s no restocking of items, however useful they may prove. It’s really badly implemented. And worse yet, when you face a boss and use an item such as a resurrection flask that brings you back to life, once you’ve used it, it’s gone forever. Even if you then die and are bounced back to the prior checkpoint, you’re shit out of luck there pal. In effect, a really badly copied take on the campfires in Dark Souls with the really damn useful estus flasks taken out of the equation.

Not to mention the checkpoints themselves are really badly placed. You often have to negotiate often tricky gauntlets to reach the next checkpoint. If you fall short, you’ll lose all your earnings and have to retread again. This is exacerbated by the woolly platforming and sometimes terrible placement of the checkpoints themselves. In one particularly egregious bit of design, one checkpoint was placed just before a miniboss. Except upon defeating them, even if you backtrack to the checkpoint, the miniboss respawns so you’ve not only got to retread, you have to face them again. No thanks.

It was about this point we realised that we were on a hiding to nothing and not having fun anymore. It was like trying to play Donkey Kong one handed on a touch screen interface. Pretty much impossible then.

Just as we were about to put the finishing touches to our review, Beyond the Ice Palace II was determined to have the last laugh on our account. A patch hit a week or so after release, so we thought we’d go back to our save to see if anything had improved since the bulk of our playthrough. Only our save upon loading took us back to the title screen. No error message to say it was corrupted, but we can only assume it has been. As a result, what little goodwill we’d managed to garner by sheer dogged determination was entirely eroded by this. We tried to start a new game, but the menu warned us our save would be deleted. We’ll not take the risk thanks, instead we’ll wait and see if another patch fixes matters. Though we doubt it will.

We thought that Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator  was the prime candidate for most shoddy post-release patch this year, but Beyond the Ice Palace II has taken that crown and run off with it.

The positives, if there are any, is that when you begin to get into the swing of things, there’s a modicum of enjoyment to be garnered here. But when things go wrong, they go badly wrong. The insipid platforming, terrible in-game commerce system and horribly implemented checkpoints leave Beyond the Ice Palace II writhing in a hessian sack as it goes downriver towards a waterfall. The music is alright in a gothic Castlevania sorta way at least. But for now, avoid.