Bard's Tale IV - Hands-on Impression

Ars Technica went hands-on with The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep.

Add some Hearthstone to your classic RPG

Let's start with the combat, which is, by necessity, a bit of a departure from the text-based combat of the original Bard's Tale. In this game, each battle takes place on a grid of tiles overlaid on top of the existing 3D world, representing the spaces characters can occupy. Half of the tiles—those closest to my perspective—could only be inhabited by my party members, while the other half could only be occupied by enemies. It's a turn-based system in which you assign a set number of action points for your party, then end your turn to see the resulting melee.

Positioning is key in this battle system; placing a fighter in front of a mage to protect the latter from many attacks is a good strategy, for instance. Each attack, on both sides of the battlefield, only affects tiles in a preset range. One attack might light up a T-shape of tiles, while others would attack in a straight line, for example. Those attacks are determined partly by your characters' abilities, but others were made available to characters by the equipment they carried.

The flow of the game felt very similar to that of digital card games like Hearthstone or The Elder Scrolls Legends. Each battle was a puzzle that could be solved by arranging party members in the right formations and spending action points on the right actions. And there was just a little bit of randomness to make things interesting now and then—though the demo I played didn't have nearly as much randomness to it as one would find in a zany Hearthstone match.

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