A long-running PC series of games, The Bard’s Tale is a well-known dungeon crawler that debuted back in 1982 for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Featuring dungeon crawling mechanics that were novel for the time, The Bard’s Tale: IV Barrows Deep is more or less standard role-playing game fare by today’s standards.
How to Download The Bard’s Tale: IV Barrows Deep
To download the full game click on the Download button at the end of the review. The Bard’s Tale: IV Barrows Deep can be downloaded either from GOG or Steam. It’s worth to know that just a month before the release of this game The Bard’s Tale Trilogy came out, which was complete remaster of the three RPGs of yore which hailed from the 80s and early 90s!
The Game Review
Making your way through dungeons you encounter creatures that you have to defeat in battle, leveling your player’s skills along the way. The combat is mainly generated through random encounters and features the head-on format seen today in the Persona series of games as well as some of the older Dragon Quest titles. This is as opposed to the Final Fantasy side view presentation in which the player’s party is on one side of the screen and his opponent’s on the other.
One of the first major PC role-playing game titles to weed a deep narrative with a hugely engaging combat and leveling system, The Bard’s Tale eventually evolved into more advanced iterations of the core concept with The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep being the most recent incarnation of the tried-and-true Bard’s Tale formula.
The series was originally developed by Interplay, the same outfit behind the classic Fallout titles and New Vegas, The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep comes from the developers over at inXile Entertainment and is published by that company as well.
Similarly told from a first-person perspective, The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a party-based dungeon crawler like its forebears but built with Unreal Engine 4 giving it a level of graphical fidelity that the former titles could only dream about.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the game follows titles like Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera in general gameplay style and narrative presentation. A thoroughly modern game with a classic game at its heart, The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is designed to be welcoming to newcomers but familiar to older fans that helped bring the series back.
Promising a distillation of the core classic experience from the old Bard’s Tale PC games, this RPGlargely delivers on that promise and carves out its own unique space in an otherwise crowded and underappreciated genre of games.
Built around the mechanics of leveling and exploring, the game does not shy in the details of the game and breathes new life into a world that has long laid dormant.
A huge aspect of the classic games, all of the lore and the magic of the older games is present in the fourth Bard Tale. It fully takes advantage of modern technology to weave a tale that is compelling and completely original.
In an industry filled with open-world clones and endless action RPGs, it is a change of pace to be sure to take on a game like The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep which is much more methodical and considered than its action-heavy brethren. But that’s part of the magic of the Bard’s Tale series. For those gamers looking for an experience and not just a game, there are few titles out that deliver quite as this one does.
