Celtic Songs and Ale! The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Review

INTRODUCTION

Only 30 Years and we finally have a sequel.... Well that is is you're old enough to remember the first 3 games. Ignoring the 2004 fun spin-off, we finally got the 4th game in the series and another dungeon to crawl in. So how does this modern sequel fare? It has some nice ideas but it's quite messy. Stick around to find out more.

Skara Brae, where the action takes place

GAMEPLAY

Well.. as the name implies it's a dungeon crawler type of game. Think of Legend of Grimrock as a comparison. You navigate the world like through a labyrinth and engage different mobs with your squad.

Now to detail that. The game is a bit messy here, you begin by watching an execution then are sent off to talk to a fellow with small tutorial pop-ups. It sort of assumes you played this kind of games before. You navigate the world in real time and aren't restricted by squares like other games in the genre. So far so simple but the combat is quite different. While navigation is in real time, you have to check by getting quite close to the foes to see if you can defeat them or you should move along, If you are about to engage the enemies you transfer into a turn based combat system which is quite well done, exactly what you'd expect from a dungeon crawler. your side and the opposite side each get 8 squares where the units can be or move around. Of course your party, which can have a maximum of 6 members, starts in the squares you arranged it in during exploration gameplay. Now each action costs a point and you will have to weight in if you should spend all action points on one character doing multiple actions or multiple characters doing one action which makes you think a bit more before taking an action. While the game has flaws, this is where it shines.

Battling an evil Elf , that was followed by a few others in a second round.

What is also worth mentioning, though some might hate it, is the saving system. yes if you exit the game you continue from where you left, but to save progress in case you die you need to get to a saving stone, which, *drum rolls*, you can chose to destroy for extra experience instead of saving at it. The concept is quite nice, albeit not casual friendly and for the time being neither user friendly since the game can experience random crashes, quite often, though the first patch, fixed quite a number of them.

Ok so you probably are wondering about races, leveling and all that. Well you got a standard inventory system where you can equip your characters, and have the chance to see them how they look in 3D, an inventory which you'll have to keep ordered or it can easily become a mess, and while it's paged and my guess infinite, it borrows heavily from the Diablo-like inventory but with no options to properly order items or manage them. Leveling on the other hand is quite straight forward, you gain xp from combat and quests, you level up, get skill points, invest them in the skills you are interested, skills that are split into tiers, forcing you to spend a certain number of skills in one tier before unlocking another, for me it's quite nice and you have enough options to customize how your character plays. And leaving races and character creation for last, as this is optional as you can keep with the pre-made starting character after the introduction. You have 4 classes, Bard, Fighter, Practitioner and Rogue and four Races , Human (which has 3 origins), Dwarf, Elf and Trow. From that point customization is quite limited to a few predetermined looks and voices and while you will obtain some companions as you progress, you can also earn and spend mercenary coins to recruit custom party members created by you.

The skill system is quite interesting and is quite different for the four classes.

STORY

So the story is quite generic about 2 evil gods, war between races and an evil that is to come. It's nothing that special and your character doesn't get much background story before being thrown into the action. You have multiple dialogue options when conversing with characters but don't expect mass effect levels of storytelling. It will keep you for 30 to 40 hours stuck to the game, even more, depending on how much you like exploring.

Character creation/ Mercenary recruitment screen.

AUDIO

Now here's where the game made me love it. The Scottish voice acting is on point, the soundtrack is lovely, with a very Celtic tone about it. The game really sticks to the lore it presents. Even now as I am writing, I am listening to the soundtrack in background. But while it sounds perfect there are some points that they failed to nail. The German accent in the game might start World War 3 and the French accent sounds like anything but French. But hey, at least it's fully voice acted!

Talking below about character faces, ugh...

GRAPHICS

Unreal Engine 4, that's what the game claims it is built in, and while this sounds great on paper it kinda makes you forget about that. Sure it's not an AAA game but plenty a things feel Photoshoped there, the faces on most of the npcs are far from pleasant, and the game doesn't run very great. Feeling overconfident I pushed everything to max and of course 4k but the fps struggled to get to 60fps so I dropped to 1440p but even there there were issues and frequent frame drops. I'd love to say it's because the game looks so good but sadly it's just bad optimization.

Even opening doors requires a bit of puzzle solving

WRAP-UP

You want a good dungeon crawler with rewarding gameplay without really caring about graphics and story? Then this is a definite buy, bugs aside, it's very good at doing this but sadly it's a bit stale in the storytelling and looks departments. If you buy it expecting AAA quality then expect disappointment.

Overall Score 7/10 (7.125 for those who want precision)

•     Graphics 5/10
•     Audio 9/10
•     Story 6/10
•     Gameplay 8.5/10

Game details:

Developer: inXile Entertainment
Publisher: inXile Entertainment
Platform: Windows, Linux, macOS, Xbox One, PS4
Release Date: Nov. 10, 2017
Launch Price: 34.99Eur (Standard Edition)

[Steam Link]