The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Review - Page 3
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What do I mean by simplistic? Well, there's a total of five attributes in the game. Strength governs damage across the board for both warriors and spellcasters, Constitution directly represents health, and Intelligence determines how good a character is at channeling spells. And then, for some reason, the game considers Armor Class and Spell Points to also be attributes. And that's that.
Now, when it comes to races, you have several flavors of human, dwarves, elves, and the trow that are like a mix of halflings and goblins. Each race comes with a single unique passive ability. Dwarves, for example, can't be moved by enemies and Baedish humans get additional skill points when leveling up.
The game's four classes are the Bard who drinks lots of booze and buffs the party, the Fighter who hits things with other things and moves other combatants around, the Rogue who exchanges opportunity points for damage, and the Practitioner who casts spells and wins you the game.
Each class has access to a few dozen skills. Each time a character levels up, they get a single skill point. Some skills raise attributes, others grant active abilities, and others yet give powerful passive bonuses to those active abilities.
The skills are divided into three tiers and are arranged into distinct skill trees, so that in order to get to the stronger skills, you have to specialize your characters in certain ways. On top of that, some of the skill trees are connected by dotted lines, which means that skills in that particular tree are mutually exclusive.
And on top of that, some skills, like the Rogue's Hide in Shadows or the Practitioner's Dragon Breath can also be used outside of combat. The former makes your party harder to spot, and the latter acts as a magic torch.
And after completing a certain quest, you'll be able to gain access to the Cleric skill tree that acts as a prestige class of sorts and gives access to a number of healing abilities and fairly strong combat passives.
All this gives you a fair degree of character-building freedom that you wouldn't expect this game to have after playing it for just an hour or two.
You are also free to mess things up, since you can't change your characters' skills after choosing them. Personally, I liked this feature because it made me feel like my choices when leveling up mattered and that I had to live with them and adjust to my sub-optimal decisions, instead of just figuring out how things worked and creating a min-maxed party that was good at everything.
But if you mess up too much, as you play through the game you'll find plenty of mercenary tokens that allow you to create new characters and use them to bolster your party.
The strangest quirk of Barrows Deep's skill system that needs to be mentioned is its weapon-specific skills. Contrary to what common sense may tell you, in Barrows Deep you don't need a bow to use bow skills or a sword to use sword skills. As long as you have a skill mastered and memorized, you can use it in combat regardless of what you have equipped. However, appropriate weapons usually grant significant bonuses to their skills, so in the end, you will want to use the right weapons with the right skills anyway.
The big exception are the elven puzzle weapons that require you to solve their puzzles in order to unlock their unique features, like stunning the entire enemy team for a round, or dropping a deadly avalanche of cabbages on an enemy.
Back when these weapons were first announced, I had high hopes for them, and the end result is kind of cool in a way, but they do disappoint a bit. First, unless you craft them yourself, their base stats will be much lower than those of normal late-game weapons. Then, the puzzles themselves are usually quite similar between weapons. And finally, the original announcement boasted that we'll be able to fail the puzzles and ruin the weapons. And I don't know if maybe I wasn't trying to fail hard enough, but during my playthrough, the weapons were only getting stronger.
Apart from the elven stuff, all the other gear is mostly randomized, with a few unique pieces here and there. The unique stuff is great and oftentimes grants you special active abilities, but the rest is sort-of just there. Or not there, since drops are also randomized. Which is at its worst when you spend a good fifteen minutes solving a tricky environmental puzzle only to get a few coins and an item that goes straight to the nearest vendor.
