Planet Bob - The Bard's Tale (2006)

RSS Bot · October 31, 2006

Hi there!

When Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay, left the sinking ship somewhen in 2002, he started inXile, who's first project was to be a brandnew "The Bard's Tale" game. Well, it's a double edged sword. Of course Brian partially helped designing the original Bard's Tale, but then again does EA hold all copyrights regarding Character names, story line, graphics, etc...

I'm playing this game for some 10 hours by now. What we get is a game, that has virtually nothing to do with the Bard's Tale, but the name. And a Bard. For a quick review, it looks and plays like a quick and dirty Diablo clone. Partially simplified, as there's no real inventory for example: The Bard will always automatically pick the better weapon. I kinda think it's even a plus here, as I really hate inventory managing in most Diablo clones.

Most other changes are for the worse. The magic-summoning system for example is rather complicated, it requires a sequence of 3 keystrokes to summon something. What also sucks, is that you have to click all your enemies individually to death. Every single swordstroke a click. I can't play for much longer than an hour a day, because after that my mouse-finger hurts too much. Also in each game area, there's only one type of enemies: Roaming through a forest, you will slaughter 200 wolves for example, seeing nothing else at all. The first dungeon: You'll endlessly hack'n'slash yourself through 2 different kinds of evil plants. It gets so incredibly repetitive and boring, you're like "Aiiiye, not again another dungeon level full of plants!" when finding a staircase...

All graphics are totally substandard for a 2005 game. They look more like a late 90's title and are a far cry from Dungeon Siege, which is years older.

The game is divided into 15 chapters and now around chapter 5, I'm close to call it quits. The whole game is really a desaster from gamedesign. Only thing that keeps me coming back, is the the parody humour of the game. I sorta don't want to miss a joke, as the game is really very funny.

Anyway, using my binary rating system, I have no other choice but :thumbsdown: