The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Review - Page 4
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Article Index
So, how do you use all those weapons? You take them into battle, of course.
The combat in Barrows Deep is turn-based and takes place on a 4x4 grid divided in half between the opposing parties. Your actions before a battle starts determine who gets to go first or how your enemies will be arranged on their side of the grid. Some of the battles have multiple waves of enemies, which allows you to face more than eight of them in a row. There are three damage types that interact with armor in different ways, and all the active abilities have unique areas of effect.
Your enemies all have their own abilities and tricks, like skeletons that you have to kill on the same turn or they'll keep resurrecting, or berserkers that retaliate when hit by melee attacks. All in all, there's a lot to consider when approaching the game's combat, and early on it offers a satisfying degree of challenge. The normal difficulty is perhaps a bit too easy, but hard will provide you with some neat encounters and tough boss battles.
That is until you find powerful gear and unlock some of the stronger skills. By then, you'll have figured out a winning strategy which you will use to win most encounters with little to no effort. And the most unfortunate part there is that you do all those things with a good chunk of the game left to go.
So, you have the early game when you feel weak and outclassed. You have the mid game where you become strong and exact your revenge on all the enemies that seemed tough and scary. And then you have the late game where combat becomes a mindless chore that just wastes your time.
The existing enemy and skill variety just can't support the game's length. I would have much preferred a shorter, more focused experience with fewer repeating puzzles and battles that exist solely to pad out the hour count, but as the bards said, you can't always get what you want.
Technical Information
Sadly, Barrows Deep was released in a sorry state where if you think of a possible issue, you could probably find it in the game.
The game crashed on me multiple times. It took over a minute to load its larger areas. It didn't run all that well and didn't look nearly good enough to justify such poor performance. I've also encountered quite a few bugs - I had items duplicate, I got stuck on the terrain, I saw flickering textures, and had skills not work as intended.
On top of it all, there were numerous typos here and there, and early on, some people encountered a game-breaking bug that made it impossible to complete the main quest.
The game's inventory is one of the clunkiest inventories ever, and you don't even get the benefit of a pause while trying to manage that mess of poorly sorted tabs and mounds of crafting garbage.
You can only save the game at certain locations, and as some cruel joke, you also get an option to break most of the checkpoints for some additional experience. Which is not a very smart thing to do when the game can crash at any moment. Luckily, these checkpoints are never too far apart, so if you save at every opportunity, you should never loose too much progress. Additionally, the game autosaves when you quit, so you don't even have to backtrack to the last checkpoint when you have to stop playing.
All these issues are exactly why, right after the game launched, inXile Entertainment promised to fix as many of them as possible in the coming weeks. I finished my playthrough before the second patch dropped, but even the first one fixed a good number of bugs and slightly improved the game's performance.
Because of that, I trust inXile to fix the game's technical issues in a timely fashion and don't really count them against the game. Still, if you consider picking it up, I would advise you to at least wait until the first three, already announced, patches are released.
Conclusion
In the end, I feel like The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep suffers from something of an identity crisis and doesn't know exactly want it wants to be.
It manages to combine plentiful quest markers for the main quest with quite a few side quests, and some of the latter give you very little to go on and there is an expectation that you'll just figure them out eventually. It has a robust party-based combat system, but it doesn't give you a full party for a good dozen hours of play time. It hides plenty of well-hidden secrets and satisfying side areas, but its main story is as linear as it gets.
A lot of these design choices are frustrating, but despite that nagging feeling that things could have been a bit more satisfying, I had a lot of fun playing the game, exploring its areas, and solving its puzzles and riddles. We're not exactly swimming in dungeon crawlers these days, so I'd certainly recommend it to anyone interested in this particular subgenre of RPG. But do yourself a favor and wait until it's all patched up and has a few more coats of polish.
