The game may cause some motion sickness, even when fooling around with the FOV and the blur, but this depends from person to person. Actions may not display on the screen, only for all of them to be triggered in a chain reaction after a few minutes. Loading screens can take very long even on optimal computers, and the game tends to bug and crash at very random moments. What is lacking, is the optimization of the game. But I do not believe these points are deal breakers.

And the story can be a little bland or linear at times, nothing particularly memorable or innovative. The models, textures, and parts of the UI could have been handled differently for a better look. Your party has some dialogue here and there, which is brought into the spotlight thanks to the marvelous job in the voice acting department.įor the looks, however… let’s say they are what you would expect from a Kickstarter game as opposed to a game with an AAA budget. You can easily find yourself wandering through town and listening to the locals sing or talk. The world feels very much alive thanks to these. The game is called “Bard’s Tale,” after all which is reflected even in in-game mechanics through the songs you learn to interact with the environment. The puzzles aren’t very difficult, but they do tend to get repetitive after a while.īut where this game truly shines, I believe, is in the music and the voice acting. You cannot back-step in your skill trees, so if you aren’t careful, you could end up with a lot of difficulties to keep your party at float during battle. You cannot access your inventory in battle, so you have to prepare ahead of time. Rinse and repeat until the end of the battle.īard’s Tale IV is a very strategic game for plenty of reasons. Most actions you take use either a spell or action point, both of which you have in limited supplies per battle, and you take all your actions during your turn, then your enemy gets to do the same. Based on different classes, races, and skills you take, the way you battle may differ, but it all revolves around action cost, spell points and turns. Now, this is where the strategy part comes in. When the battle starts, you are placed in a 4 x 4 grid, divided into two equal 2 x 4 sides one for the enemy, and one for your party. Of course no every enemy is an undefeatable task most actually fall in the medium or easy category. This is very important, because when the game tells you that you will die in this battle, should you take it, it means you will. Now, when talking about in-game and battle mechanics, it unfolds like this: For battling, you will always be able to see your foes in the map, and if you get close enough, you will get an indicator of their power. The maps, layout, textures and depth works wonderfully to mask this core feature of dungeon crawlers, so that it stayed true to the mechanics for veterans, yet approachable and with more freedom to new players. Truth is, the world is as linear as it was in the original titles, but you wouldn’t be able to tell at all while playing the game. Instead of the usual grid-based movement of the genre, this game offers a more open world for the player to roam freely- or at least, so it seems at first glance. This title goal was to take the story of the world of Caith and, more specifically, the city of Skara Brae to a modern audience, with a similar yet newer approach to the dungeon crawler genre. The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a sequel to The Bard’s Tale trilogy from 1986-1991, funded by way of Kickstarter back in 2015.

Ps4 the bards tale 4