The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep

The game was funded via crowdfunding several years ago, with the promise to create a real sequel to the Original Bards Tale 1 to 3, staying as close to the original as possible while implementing modern technology, and the advantages it offers. The Backers of the game are now claiming that they went to far off that path, and Inxile is basically completely ignoring all their comments, not even acknowledging that there is a problem, and only reacting to those people who praise their game. Some things that are not in the game that were trademarks of the original: 1. A multitude of races and classes. The new game lacks a lot of the races and classes of the old trilogy. 2. There are no random encounters. Anyone that remembers the classic Bards Tale, remembers that one vital part was to grind through Dungeons for XP, gold and Loot. That part is gone, completely. 3. The Leveling system is now completely meaningless. All you get when you level is 1 Skill point that you can use for a skill that is basically 'You can now wear X'. You also dont get any HP on levelups. Everyone that knows the originals will see how this is a problem. 4. The combat system. While it is clear that you can not use the classic text based combat system in a modern game, they went a completely different route. Combat is now strategic on a 4x4 tile, and every combat takes several minutes, compared to the seconds it took to resolve combat in the original. 5. Skills and crafting. Was never a part of Bards Tale, and even though it could have been a valuable and interesting addition, the way they implemented it was very poor. For example: You can only have three skills usable at any given time, and it is placed in an mmo style taskbar. 6. Spells. One trademark of Bards Tale was its huge amount of spells. Currently they maybe implemented a Fifth of that, and compared to the spells of the original trilogy, they are utterly boring. 7. You can not create your Group of adventurerers from Scratch. Instead you start with being given a premade character and have to progress through several hours of gameplay before you are given the option to create your own band of adventurers. Replay Value: Zero. 8. They retconned the lore. Several events of the classic Bards Tale are completely ignored or changed in hindsight. Skara Brae is now a coastal city all of a sudden. NPC that were officially dead are now back all of a sudden (Lagoth Zanta, Roscoe, to name just too), and the Big ass Villain of part 3, Tarjan, a god that killed all other gods and nearly destroyed all of creation, now simply is a powerhungry but misunderstood mage. 9. Skara Brae is now in Scotland, or something resembling scotland? 10. And this is one of the major gripes people have: Anyone remember the 2004 reimplementation of Bards Tale? Yes, that atrocity of a game that basically had a Bard run through Dungeons in Diablo Style, using immature potty humour? That very same kind of humour is now part of Bards Tale, and the Backers hate it.While Bards Tale never was a super serious game, it still had at times a very dark background, and this new game is littered with immature jokes and stuff like that all over the place. 11. Gridbased movement, and mapping: The game was promised to be a tilebased gridbased turnbased dungeoncrawler. While it does have an option to turn gridbased movement on, it is currently not working and from what can be seen was clearly just slapped on the freeform movement. Everyone that played the original Bards Tale knows that one major part of dungeon crawling was to create your own map. This, with the currently implemented form of movement, is quite literally impossible.

I backed this game on Kickstarter back in 2015 and started my playthrough roughly around the time Patch 2 or 3 were released in 2018. The game contains some nice and unique elements which distinguish it from others. One example are puzzle weapons in which you have to solve puzzles on weapons in order to unlock their potential. Another is the 'offering' places which require the use of a codewheel to align star systems in order to determine what to sacrifice. The game even comes with a printable codewheel which was a very nice touch. The combat system was for me the high note of the game. A turn-based grid system with lots of interactions between different skills/weapons etc. This is not your regular RPG with some puzzles in it, but more like a puzzle game with RPG elements. Initially I was thinking 'these puzzles keep me from the game' until I realised the puzzles 'are' the game. While in itself the puzzles are quite fun and do-able it's the sheer amount and repitition which turns it into a sludge. Especially in the later parts the puzzles just stretch the game for no good reason. Where other games come with unique puzzles as you progress, this one just recycles the same puzzle types over and over (for example moving blocks, playing with light beams, cogwheel puzzles, etc). After the x-th same puzzle type pops up it's like '*sigh* not this again ...' Combine the above with a lot of backtracking and revisiting of previous levels and it becomes a chore. When I was roughly halfway the game I had seen and done everything, obtained the best gear etc. The rest of the game was just the same backtracking, same puzzles repeated, same enemies etc. In total it took me 60hrs to beat the game on normal where probably more than half the time was 'wasted' doing the above. This also means that for roughly half of the game you find useless items, even when defeating bosses since your current gear is already better. Difficulty-wise I played the game on normal and have to say this was a bit too easy. Nearly all fights (with 6 characters) ended in 1-2 turns, only some bosses provided more challenge. Especially when you start understanding the skill trees and how things interact it becomes quite easy. As an example, the game comes with an 'overachieving' achievement which seems to indicate obtaining a high level, however I unlocked this already mid-game with no effort, so getting experience is really easy. By the end of the game I had nearly full skill trees on all my characters up to a point that I had to spent skillpoints in unneeded skills. The world itself doesn't feel living at all. Most NPC's just look the same and are just standing there, repeating the same dialog over and over. Also the fact that you can't jump or go down a ledge makes for a very linear/confined feel. There is no sense of freedom. The main story-arc is not so bad, I also believe they added a 'best off' of all the bosses of previous Bard's Tale games. However the issue is in the way it's presented: In essence it's 'Do puzzles to reach item X, then do puzzles to reach boss Y', now rince and repeat for each level. One thing which does stand out in the story is the music and voice acting. The voice acting is of a very high level, truly excellent! The music is really nice, with unique Gaelic songs, marvelous! My only gripe here is that most of the time it's a short piece which is played in a loop. In most cases it's ok, but sometimes it can get on your nerves. Especially when looking into a vendor's stall and hearing the same short piece repeated over and over is a bit too much. Another nice touch related to sound and voice was the fact that, when loading a game, a bard recounts the tale so far. As a final point some remarks on quality-of-life items: The inventory can't be sorted which makes for a mess especially late game. I also had the feeling the game became sluggish when there were a lot of items in the inventory. The map doesn't allow for notations (which would be handy for puzzles) and unfortunately rotates. This can be a personal preference but I like the North to remain upwards always. Again especially for some of the puzzles this made it more difficult than needed. The save system is quite interesting i.e. you can only save in certain points or choose to convert those save points into bonus XP. Overall I felt there were sufficient save points, yet my gripe with this system is the occasional crash. Over the course of the game I had 2 crashes which caused me to redo parts from my last savepoint. This would never happen with a standard quicksave feature. In a subsequent patch the 'save everywhere' option was added, however I stuck to the original system due to the bonus XP. Besides the crashes the game also comes with some minor bugs. Some are in weapon/skill abilities, others in the skill trees. It's always a bit of a bummer that, after spending a skill point you figure out the skill is bugged. Did I enjoy the game? The combat system pulled me through, yet overall there was just too much repetition turning the game into a chore from mid-game on. I would give it a 5/10 and can't really recommend it, only when it's perhaps dirt cheap in a sale/bundle.

Kickstarter Backer here. I'm not entirely underwhelmed, but I'm definitely going to say the game has a lot of flaws. I wouldn't say The Bard's Tale 4 is a bad game, but it needs a lot of polish and balancing if some of the other shortcomings are to be ignored. I think this game can be redeemed, but in its current state I can't really recommend it. There was a lot of frustration around preformance and physically getting stuck in level geometry, much more so than anything related to intended difficulty (puzzles and battles). I've completed everything there is to the game and thensome (including all the achievements), and the game has a lot of fun ideas and decent lore, but the game is just so full of bugs and inconsistencies that it's hard to ignore. Frequently I would get stuck while walking around, either walking up things I'm obviously not intended to, or getting stuck in stair railings. It happened so often that I'm absolutely sure it should have come up during playtesting. Not a 10 minute stretch would go by where it didn't happen to some degree. Combat would frequently break cadence, with strange delays and pauses, ranging from character actions taking forever to carry out and the turns themselves not ending properly. Attacking an enemy from behind a wall will get you stuck, forcing you to reload. There's various other bugs peppered here and there, like NPCs no longer responding, or presumably abandoned quests (such as the Existential Crisis sword). The game doesn't look great, nor does it run particularly well, even after patches. It's just okay. The world feels rather static, even compared to other games that are similar, such as Grimrock, mostly because a majority of the NPCs just sit there idling away. Enemies patrol, but that's about it. Occasionally there will be some wildlife that will be floating above the ground, or disappears mid-gallop across your screen, but other than that there's not a whole lot to make the world feel like a "living" world. Combat is fun, but rather restrictive, as characters can only have four abilities (less if an item that isn't a trinket provides abilities, which is absolutely stupid), which is something of a strange limit. Passive skills end up being much more powerful simply because there's no reason to aquire skills you don't need or can't use. Weapons and their skills are strangely implemented; the system I think would benefit more from something more standard, as the eclectic choice mostly just serves to pidgeonhole characters you gain along your journey. That said, cheesing combat is very easy, to the point where a warrior and two mages can trounce the last section of the game and final boss with no losses. Not really a complaint, but the limitations do little to inhibit extreme power while limiting fun and build exploration. With the lack of resetting your character's skills, players are either going to make sub-optimal characters that they won't want, or experiment with throwaway mercenaries. Loot is rather sparse, and many of the special items feel less special when they eat up mastery (skill) slots. The inventory sucks. There's no way to sort items or consolidate stacks automatically, swapping items between pages is a huge chore, and how the game handles swapping items (dragging and dropping another item on top of another to change places) will often send you on a miniature hunt to figure out where it went. Crafting isn't particularly useful except to save money, and there's not enough to do with money as I was sitting on 30,000 by the end. This really needs a rework. The lore's good, and the voice acting is fine. The puzzles range from simple to difficult. No real complaints here regarding many of these things, aside from the lack of puzzle variation. All and all, a decent display in these aspects, but they would probably shine better if the rest of the game felt less lacking. With a few more patches, especially to preformance and collision problems, and maybe some rebalancing, this game could definitely be worth your time.

This is actually a really cool game. The ambience, music, setting, etc. is beautiful. There are some performance issues but nothing that can't be dealt with. In 20 or so hours of play I encountered one incident of having to reload a save due to a bug and 1 fatal error (resulting in again, reloading a save.). Not great, not unplayably bad. The main reason I can't recommend this game is, despite its unique combat system and beauty and depth and storyline and and the rest of it, and the glorious feeling of nostalgia, after a while, it feels like you're playing Frustrating Puzzle Simulator. Now don't get me wrong. I like puzzles. And some of the puzzles in this are quite clever, and good. Unfortunately, it seems that they decided to just use the same ones over and over and over and OVER Ragequit #1: There's a puzzle involving a flying wisp and turning totems. You are introduced to this puzzle gradually and it becomes increasingly complex. It was very satisfying working through the various iterations of this puzzle. The first time. Even the second. But two zones later, you're still seeing these wisp totems. Same thing with the door-gear-cogs. Cool idea, ridiculously over-used, throughout the game. Did I mention spinning runes? Pushing blocks onto things? Yes, over-used, throughout the game. The problem is that most of the puzzles aren't very intuitive. There's no clear objective of what you're trying to achieve. Do I want to match all these symbols? Do them in a sequence? Oh wait, reverse the sequence for seemingly no reason whatsoever but just because we can? Or also fun, game says "read this book" and that book doesn't say anything, it actually meant to read this other book.... Like I said, don't get me wrong. A few good puzzles to solve as you go, is great. But this game shoves puzzles down your throat at every turn. Consider entering a tower and fighting your way through it. Commence rotating energy thingies to open doors. Fine. Some cant be rotated, ok fine. Rotate thingies on floor, open doors. OH LOOK thingies are on wall now. Ok no problem, rotate thingies on wall and floor. Next room. Same crap again. Now they're on the ceiling. Seriously? Enough already, i want to go fight the things and kill them and get the loots and proceed with the quest. EVERY SINGLE ROOM YOU STEP IN, THROUGHOUT THE GAME, in EVERY SCENE, HAS crap for you to push, pull, rotate, match, etc. Lets play match the constellation. Lets play push the blocks onto things. It just got old. A lot of the stuff in this was great from an exploratory sense, I loved the exploration abilities, the combat was unique, and the skill system - all of that was great. But I spend about 75% of my time rotating blocks and putting buttons, and I finally got fed up with it. Its a shame, I'd really like to see the rest of the game, but enough is enough.

This game has been an absolute joy to play. Full disclosure: I did a 4 hour sponsored event from inXile on release day, and have since done multiple 4 hour streams since (all unsponsored) This game has been a breath of fresh air in the RPG genre. The world, combat mechanics, voice acting and humor are all top-notch. The puzzles have been engaging and fun to do, the world has been interesting and engaging, the combat is interesting with tons of different approaches, the classes seem interesting and customizable. Granted, i'm only about 12 hours in right now but I've been enjoying the hell out of this game and plan to continue streaming it for the foreseeable future. Also it's important to mention that inXile is on it in terms of following through with making this game a polished product. Although there are definitely some bugs and issues (including balance and technical), they already have THREE WEEKS of patch notes up and are furiously trying to get the game into a more final state. Will add more here potentially as I move through the world but yeah... Overall? This game is unique, fun and something special.

I am 21 hours in.And I must say I absolutely love this games.Yes the game had its issues on release day.(Crashing,Framerate Drops Etc...)However I was able to over look all of those thing and enjoy the game.The game is fully voice acted for one.It tells a wonderful fanastical story.Its paced very well.It boost it self with an aray of very Colorful and animated characters.Each with there own hidden agendas and circumstances.I will write another review in about a week.But this game isn't one to miss.It is a hidden jewel that must not be forgotten.

As a fan of the original Bard's Tale Trilogy I really wanted to love this game, but I don't and its not because it isn't a carbon copy of the classic 80s titles. While my introduction to computer RPGs was the original 'Tales from the Unknown Volume 1 : The Bard's Tale' I readily acknowledge that games have evolved past that point and a modern take on the game would need to adapt accordingly. I actually like the overall combat system introduced in the game and think it had plenty of promise...sadly that was not to be as the abilities implemented in the game actually get in the way of its own innovation. By the end of the game I had been using the exact same ability combination for the past 10+ levels and never even bothered to use half of the already very limited list of potential abilities. Unfortunately the game seemed designed to require such crazy synergies as encountering enemies with 75+ armor and the ability to annhiliate the entire group if they were allowed to attack even once were commonplace. It feels like someone developed a pretty cool combat system for level 1-6 and then walked away from the project leaving someone else to figure out the rest ... poorly. The puzzles are nifty, but you spend the entire second half of the game solely doing puzzles as every fight is exactly the same and lasts no more than a couple rounds. I really wanted to like this game and I even bought into the concepts it introduced in the first few levels. The game just did not seem dedicated to its own concept.

Loved the combat, story, puzzles, character progression...it was all great. The graphics were only average, but I could overlook it because of everything else. The game crashed a few times, but I was pretty good about saving frequently, so I didn't lose much...until the last time. The game crashed and upon restarting it would only let me start a new game. My saved game files are still on my drive, but the game won't load them. 70 hours of play -- "poof". I emailed inXile support - never heard back and then decided I rather move on to a new game anyway. In the end I can't recommend the game because of the instability, which is a bummer. Maybe they will have all the bugs squashed in a few more months.

As a beta tester for this game, I knew the finished product would be a disappointment from my own perspective - but wanted to give the final game a fair chance before adding a review. As someone whose first CRPG experience was Bards Tale in the mid-80's, I've been waiting a looooooong time for a proper sequel to one of my favourite series. Bard's Tale hooked me on the "blobber" style of dungeon crawler, of which I've completed dozens over the years - from the BT's to Gold Box to Wizardry's through to the post Wizardry era which has been dominated by Japanese DRPG's such as Etrian Odyssey, SMT Strange Journey and Elminage. I genuinely thought that Bards Tale 4 would be the first major Western game of this type for a decade. Sure, the original BT experience wouldn't work for a modern audience - but here was an opportunity to modernise the genre and take the ideas of three decades of game innovation into a new game. What inXile have produced is NOT a sequel to Bard's Tale 1-3 in anything more than name and a few name-drops here and there. It's first and foremost a puzzle game - dungeons and even towns are made up of interconnected puzzles with combat filling the gaps. Combat itself can be quite interesting at first, but like many ideas in the game, it doesn't quite come off. Part of the reason for this is the input/action lag, but mostly it's because certain top tier skills can trivialize encounters from a certain point onward. Character and skills themselves are another example of poor implementation - initially very restrictive, and then a mishmash of overpowered (group hide in shadows, grand conjurer) or boring (loads of +1 strength, stamina etc). On top of that, you are heavily restricted at the start of the game in your party creation and build - which is utterly out of keeping with this genre of game. That's not to say that this is a poor game. It's probably quite decent if you like basic puzzle games and have no expectations of what a Bard's Tale game should be - that much is evidenced by some of the critic reviews. However, for myself - a massive fan of Bard's Tale 1-3 and the dungeon crawler / DRPG genre in general... this is a huge miss. It's not even the most "Bard's Tale" like game released this year.