The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut

this is one of THE MOST underrated games ive ever played, hands down. no debate. the soundtrack is my will to live. i LOVE it so much, captures the vibe perfectly, even if you're just exploring or fighting an interdimensional mage. the gameplay is amazing, too- a bit jank at times but not game breaking at all. i'm usually more of a fan of open-world games, but this game still gives you plenty of secret exploration opportunities. also, it has turn-based combat, so instant W. i also love how thought-out the puzzles are, they've made me rage many times. very fun! wringneck is my goat forever and i will NEVER get rid of him.

[b][i]Cabbage? Carrots? Potatoes?[/i][/b] Well, it seems they burned all their money on the soundtrack and voice acting. It’s a solid piece, reasonably well put together for what it sets out to be, but it doesn’t surprise me at all that—even carrying the name of a classic IP—the game remained buried among the handful of Kickstarter titles that spearheaded the modern CRPG revival. The game has nothing particularly remarkable about it. It offers a passable experience, but without much personality or sense of humor (which I believe is an important detail for fans of this franchise). Don’t expect a highly customizable RPG with interesting interactions and a gripping story full of choices and charismatic characters. At best, the writing is just very dry and incapable of making you care about anything (even if it comes with decent full dubbing), much less feel like you're visiting a well-realized and efficiently presented fictional universe. And your agency is completely superficial. What we have here is a very simple, on-rails adventure. A game that boils down to a repetitive and not very immersive dungeon crawler with a questionable sense of pacing, packed with abstract and tedious puzzles that grow increasingly intrusive, and poorly developed quests that exist mostly as an excuse for you to navigate badly designed maps—which would be a nightmare to traverse if not for the guidance systems. The low production values scream at you the moment you leave the main menu. A weak presentation, terrible graphics and animations, amateurish and disjointed art direction, and a world that feels practically lifeless and impossible to take seriously, doing a poor job of hiding its artificiality. Performance is also terrible—something that was very common in indie RPGs at the time, including the console ports. Modern machines can brute-force their way through the game without much trouble, but I’m sure the hardware of the time struggled to maintain 30 FPS with visuals that were already below average. It feels extremely dated, especially when compared to modern iterations of the genre. But, ironically, what saves the experience is precisely the fact that the game is simple. Because everything is so shallow and straightforward in its goals, there’s little room to get frustrated by the lack of polish. The execution is practically that of an ’90s dungeon crawler, with the addition of a very solid and well-balanced combat system (by far the best part of the game), in which you easily fall into a satisfying and easy-to-digest progression loop. The tactical challenges the game offers—within its very limited character and equipment customization—are more than adequate. And it genuinely pains me that this system wasn’t further refined and applied to another franchise. Even the combat interface feels more appropriate to the game’s budget and manages to do much more with less, streamlining things in smart ways, emphasizing what actually matters. The exploration is quite unengaging, as are the stories the game presents, but you can kind of just keep going without caring. It's not bad enough to be a deal-breaker. I wouldn’t say it’s worth the investment—especially in terms of time—but I can safely say that the ease with which you get pulled into the game’s core activities, combined with the addition of a song that lets you skip the more irritating puzzles, makes it hard to lose focus. It’s a mediocre game, but one that delivers what it sets out to do in large quantity and without too much unnecessary time-wasting. Now, whether what it delivers is actually good enough, I honestly can’t say. This is technically my second run, now on a more appropriate platform, but after putting in a few hours, I’m not sure I feel like continuing, because my overall impression has been kinda neutral. Not good enough, not bad enough. It seems like the kind of game I could play a little bit at a time until the end, and then I wouldn't remember anything about it. Except for the music, of course. It almost seems like a crime to waste such a good soundtrack on a game like this. But I’ll say one thing: those hours flew by. And for a franchise that has never been known for having good games, this one isn't far from its peak.

I can't get into this game. Its 80% combat and the combat system kind of sucks. Its slow and dull. Everything is very corny like its a spoof, but isn't really funny. Its just a primitive turn based rpg which has made some odd choices and ended up somewhere I'm not sure I enjoy being. Instead of the chill grind of the original series, its very little grind and all hard fights. Wasteland 2 and 3 are infinitely more satisfying in this regard.

A heart-warming, beautiful adventure that beautifully balances modern gameplay with retro charm and simplicity. This is probably among my favourite 5 games of the modern era. A step back in time to an era when games were relaxing, fun charming, rewarding and built with love and care for a particular audience, rather than to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Cannot recommend this game enough. If you love the combination of puzzles and the forward thinking strategy of turn based combat, you've found what you are looking for.

Super fun Old school dungeon romp with comedy. Reminds me of my Childhood running around in Skara Brae with my 13inch Color Tv and Commodore64 attached with a AV converter black slider box playing in Skara Brae for hours on end. Good times. good times......

i love the bard's tale remastered, funny entertaining and worth the coins. this is not! (got it on sale and still feel i was robbed). the game is buggy, the fighting is not intuitive and well it's a chore. i love old school RPG's this is a puzzle game desguised in a labyrith map of boring fights and annoying puzzles. your skills don't matter, your equipment doesn't matter and pretty much anything else doesn't matter. the music is good... i was looking for an old school RPG, not whatever this is pretending to be. Not for me, no thanks.

This game in an excellent nod to cRPGs of yesteryears. If you like the old 3D Might & Magic games (namely VI and VII) or enjoyed newer versions of this style of game like Legend of Grimrock, then this game is for you. An excellent and unique blend of grid-based and turn-based combat. A very well done and balanced character talent point system. An awesome, fully orchestrated, and vocalized soundtrack and sound effects set. The environments are varied, detailed, and the puzzles are just challenging enough to appreciate but not so difficult that you would need a guide to figure anything out. This game deserves high praise, and I wish we saw more games like it these days.

Just buy it for the music : ) Games fantastic too by the way ; )

Incredibly fun not-quite-a CRPG but many crpg elements that are themselves dumbed down to make it much more accessible. Great audio and the visuals still hold up.

I'm not exactly someone who plays tons of classic dungeon crawlers. This is one of the first ones I'm trying out. That said, I think this game is really cool. First off you can play it with 3d movement instead of the blocky movement normal for dungeon crawlers. Maybe thats good for you or not but you can choose which way to play. The world is really quite stunning, although the graphics are somewhat dated they just look great. The voice acting in this game is also really good. What I like most is that this is just a good old fashioned high fantasy story. Combat is engaging, though the skills and masteries do take some getting used to. The enemies have various abilities for you to consider, and the grid based combat does keep the battles interesting as well. You get a party of adventurers and you can actually hire others and keep a bench roster and swap them out depending on what you need for a given quest. As I understand it, the story here is really quite long and I'm looking forward to it. I actually really recommend this one to anyone interested in this style of game.