What would you say about it beyond mixed bag?
Can't say anything beyond that, only expand on it. Every single element falls flat at one point or the other.
The first IWD had good story, very well designed encounters with beautiful story justifications for enemy placement, good loot and simple character progression. It was a tight package, with the only serious flaw I can remember being the lack of difficulty in later parts of the game.
IWD2 tries to add many things to that experience, but it feels like the quality assurance was not there. It was clearly a rushed product with many talented people with ambitious ideas.
The itemization is lackluster to say the least. There are many utility items that are essential at early stages, but later on they loose significance because spells do the same things better. There are too many magical items with subpar effects for which you can't find any use. It gets worse later on, in chapters 5 and 6 you're barraged with items that are no better than the stuff you already have and the only use for those items is to sell them. Only there are no actual vendors after Kuldahar. I had only one helmet for my party. The rings mostly give bonuses to deflection and so do the cloaks. Very rarely you find something with a useful effect you can use strategically. Deflection, minor elemental resistance and 1hp per turn regeneration is all you can hope for. It doesn't mean there aren't items that feel nice to find and equip, but they are rare and badly paced.
The story is simplistic with very interesting details that are not developed at all. I also very often felt confused about the reasons for doing something.
The dungeons are ridicules. The only one striking a good balance of story and fighting is imo the Underdark. The Fortress is better, but it doesn't try to strike balance which is a very IWD1 thing and that's awesome. The Ice Temple, Woods, Dragon's Butthole and even The Tower of Stairs have WAY TOO LITTLE combat and way too much backtracking, with little to no clues on how to progress. This is IWD, the combat game. I'd be fine with puzzles, even if most of them are too experimental, but give me good fights in between. The Ice Temple has a lot of enemies, but they're not challenging at all.
The character progression I found to be disappointing. I'm sure it was the shit at the time, but we've seen many games doing much better job with character customization in 3rdE. And even those were not that good. Perhaps with ultra min-max multi-classing approach this system can be fun, but playing it at insane I found very little opportunities to utilize my feats nor felt my choices had any influence on my tactics.
The skills have no use. My rouge was 5/12 and her trap disabling abilities were way too random. Those were the only ones that mattered. Perhaps skills like concentration have an impact, but concentration and knowledge are like the only skills you can invest in. With intelligence higher than 10 investing in skills in classes other than rouge is an exercise in choosing the least useless option. Diplomacy/Bluff/Intimidate skills have very little use, and you're likely to miss the instances where they're used. Despite the promising first chapter.
I'm shitting on everything, but my point is that everything you do in this game has flaws. Nothing is perfect. Except, perhaps for the RtwP combat.
RtWP in IWD1&2 is cool. You have to pause every second to survive, making it a unique blend of strategy and action. The mechanics of movement and skill use work very nice. It could work much better in the sequel if only you had more opportunities to utilize the system. Very rarely you find yourself in the situation where you fight enemies with varying methods of attack and resistances. Despite the introduction of new environmental factors like exploding barrels, the game fails to introduce unique fighting scenarios on pair with the first game. It happens from time to time, but it's not consistent.
Good things, many annoying things, not developed enough.
Much like ToEE.
I need to play something non-D&D.
