The bard's tale 4: Barrows deep review

[Hogg]

I’ve sunk about 40 hours into The Bard's Tale 4: Barrows Deep so far, and I’m not ready to hoist my 'Saved the World' tankard just yet. It's a really big game. But even though I have yet to dispatch the latest and greatest threat to the city of Skara Brae—and the greater world of Caith, because the adventure goes far beyond Skara Brae's walls—I am happy. This is the dungeon crawling adventure I've been waiting for.

The Bard's Tale 4 is a remarkable modernization of an infamously punishing old game, and the dungeon crawler genre as a whole. The update is most obviously apparent in the free-roaming movement system that lets me look and go where I want, without the conventional constraints of grid-based movement. It’s all smoke and mirrors—the levels are as linear and corridor-based as they were in the original Bard's Tale games—but the free movement, map layouts, and longer lines of sight work together to brilliantly camouflage the angular restrictiveness and make it feel more like an open-world game. 

It took me awhile to adjust to the oddities that this hybrid system sometimes enables. The tutorial level talks about sticking to the shadows to sneak past an enemy, for instance, but there's no actual stealth feature, and visibility is solely a matter of distance and positioning on the invisible grid that maps are built upon. It's often possible to stroll up to within speaking distance of an enemy without being seen.

Jumping, ducking, hiding, leaning, and other advanced movements that you’d expect from a first-person RPG aren’t possible either, because—and I feel like this really deserve emphasis—that's not what The Bard's Tale 4 is. It might be dressed up like Skyrim Lite, but it's a Bard's Tale game through and through.