So you can't just spam your strongest abilities over and over, you have to balance out which abilities you want to use in order to make each turn as efficiently as possible. Most skills from any character can only be used once per round, at best. That might mean you end up using certain characters much more than others, but it all comes down to your party set up and strategy. Rather than just picking a unit's action once per turn, every turn, and smashing some AutoBattle feature, you instead are given more input which unit actions give you the best chance to win. How I look at this is that the game is giving the player more freedom in how they choose to approach combat. Sometimes it might make sense for a certain unit to not act at all in for a time - a specific unit might be so effective against certain enemy groups that using up all 4 Opportunity on their own during a round can end up being the best strategy. You start out with 4 Opportunity per round, and the pool grows as you progress through the game. Rather than each character acting once per round as in most RPGs like this, your team at whole is given a shared action pool that all actions expend called 'Opportunity'. How actions are taken in this system is given an interesting twist also. Position alone makes battle management a lot less rote than it would be in other games, as dynamic battle placements become a key element to each encounter. Most skills can only hit enemies within a certain range, and so you'll be spending considerable time in battle moving characters around to make sure they can dish out damage effectively - or perhaps shielded well if they are on the verge of death. So, it works like most dungeon crawler systems, except positioning now becomes a major factor at all times. Your team of characters occupies one half of the grid while the opponent sits on the other half, and each party takes turns in phases. In brief, it's a round-based system on a 4x4 grid. Now, I know that describing the ins and outs of battle mechanics may not be all too interesting for a review, but give me a chance here to explain why it's such an interesting system. It's a tried-and-true system.Ĭombat itself is where Barrows Deep especially shines. Your unit abilities are derived from their class and their race, of course. At its core, the game uses a race/class system that doesn't stray too far away from the expected - there are four classes to choose from: Bard, Fighter, Rogue, and Practioner. In fact, while the game will give the player pre-written characters to use in battle, you can change these out for player-created units if you choose. While I have played Japanese dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey and Elminage, The Bard's Tale IV was my first foray into a western game of this style.īefore I say anything else, I want to emphasize that The Bard's Tale IV is not a game driven by its storyline or by its characters. I personally am not familiar first-hand with the original series, so I cannot speak much to how Barrows Deep incorporates elements from its history. The Bard's Tale is a classic first-person role-playing series, originally developed by Interplay back in the late 1980s. The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep, then, is a return to the series from Brian Fargo, the former founder of Interplay and current CEO of InXile. That might have been for the best, because by all accounts the game's launch was rough, but InXile has continued to iron it out since. Our staff was busy covering other titles like Dragon Quest XI, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Torna: The Golden Country, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and unfortunately we simply couldn't get around to Bard's Tale right away. When The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep released this past September, we at RPG Site didn't actually get a chance to review it at launch.
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