The Bard's Tale Review
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Now, some games have gotten away with simple control schemes like that -- heck, the original Diablo was famous for it -- but those games usually gave you other reasons to keep playing, such as building up your character or finding new equipment. The Bard's Tale offers neither pastime because, again, both areas are very basic. Consider the equipment. There are weapons, musical instruments, and suits of armor in the game, but there are only about 50 of them in total, and they're so straightforward that the game can manage your inventory for you, automatically equipping items that are more powerful than what you're using, and selling the rest. Upgrading your character is no more interesting. All you get to do is add points to attributes and choose new skills. That probably doesn't sound so bad, but the game allows you to max out most of the six attributes and choose way more skills than you could possibly use. Really, after making a decision early in the game about whether you'd rather dual wield weapons, use a two-handed weapon, or use a weapon and a shield, you don't have to make another decision for the rest of the game, and that's just bizarrely boring.
Finally, I played The Bard's Tale on a PC, and inXile didn't do a great job of porting the game from its console origins. The resolution is fixed at 640x480, the interface goes out of its way to avoid hotkeys and instead forces you to use some clunky menu systems, and you're only allowed to save your game at special save points. Yuck, yuck, and triple yuck.
And so, overall, I'm giving The Bard's Tale a dubious recommendation. It's a funny game (there's even a joke on the game's CDs), and I think people will find it entertaining enough as they make their way through its 20 hour campaign, but the game uses a fairly basic and uninteresting engine, it doesn't give you any reason to play through multiple times, and it probably won't leave a lasting impression on your memory. Fans of Fable and Diablo will probably get more out of The Bard's Tale than fans of Fallout and Morrowind.
