soli

Awkward navigation and controls get in the way of what I was hoping would be a great game.

Clever and witty. The game breaks the 4th wall. Unexpectedly funny and a refreshing change from the other Humble Bundle indie titles I had been trying out. As an indie game, written by one person, it blew the vast majority of other indie titles out of the water. About on par with A Short Hike, though in a much different way.

To everyone who is having trouble with load times: install the game to a SSD hard drive. It loads in just a few seconds, compared to what feels like forever on a conventional hard drive. I can say, the difference is like night and day! The game is heavily focused on the music & sound effects / ambient sounds -- to get the best experience, I strongly recommend a good sound card & good speakers or headphones. Otherwise the game feels flat and mediocre -- really, it's like adding great sound & music to movies rather than watching a movie on Mute. I'm personally impressed by how Bard's Tale 4 incorporates puzzles into the adventure. Having played Bard's Tale 1-3, I recall having to solve numerous puzzles and devious & clever riddles (apparently a Celtic tradition). Barrows Deep has an innovative combat system that reminds me of the old-school feel of combat, spiced up -- almost like a mini-game. I do recommend staying closely to the main storyline, which gives the game a flow and feel which is rather nice.

This game is a very big let-down coming from Ultima VII. I think perhaps they were trying to target people who prefer platformers to gain a different audience -- this game is essentially a platformer game. The world is very limited in NPC's, most characters have an obvious game purpose (and that's all there is to them), it makes all the NPC's feel contrived and artificial. If you liked the previous Ultimas, then you'll most likely be very disappointed in this game.

The tedium of constantly having to travel from map to map in search of trainers to advance your skills for each character really detracted from the game play. I wish there was an option to skip the (what I felt) simple, mindless side quests, which are required to level your party high enough to survive the main storyline's dungeons. The story itself near the end game was actually pretty good (the few lines of story dialog that you get); however, given how much energy you have to put in just to get there, I felt a lot of the game was filler material. There's so much needless running around just to make the player spend more time playing the game. I remember the days of Might & Magic II, where I felt the actual gameplay was fun and streamlined, none of the "oh no, this entire game only gives players 3 hours of solid gameplay, let's add more gameplay hours by making simple things (like leveling up) way more complicated in a tedious way, since we're too tired to think of a fun way to do it!"