The biggest disappointment I've experienced to date. Has some good ideas, but has virtually no quality roleplaying.
User Rating: 6 | The Bard's Tale XBOX
I had really high hopes for this game. Unfortunately, the game didn't quite turn out the way I imagined I would. I have only played it for about an hour, so the game might grow on me, in which case I'll update this review, but for now the game is not really that good. I'll start with the negatives. There are a LOT. First off, It's an RPG, but you really don't get to do that much role-playing at all. When you talk to NPCs, you can only tell the character to give a negative or positive reaction to them. Thats enough to get a LOT of marks off in my book as an RPG. Secondly equipment. As the Gamespot reviewer stated, there isn't much stuff to buy from stores, and the items themselves don't have much variety, and you don't use much equipment. (I have only played for an hour so maybe its just that way in the beginning). Thirdly the camera is a problem. You can't change it that much, and you really can't see very far in front of you, it would be nice to get better angles to help that instead of just a top down in which you can just turn it basically. Another negative are the artifacts and spells. They take WAY to long, and create cutscenes. Very annoying. I didn't see as much of a problem with the time it took to use a healing spell as the Gamespot reviewer, it was the cutscenes after that bothered me. Also with the bugbear cave at the beginning, it didn't seem to make sense that a bugbear lived in a cave with highly technical traps, I didn't think they had that kind of intelligence. Another problem was bugs. I had 2 bugs before I even played the game for an hour. When I first pressed start I heard sound but no video, then the cutscene with the giant rat stuck when I beat him. Ok now to the positives. There are some cool things about this game. The image of your character is kind of interesting with his sarcastic tones and well done bard demeanor, summoning things are fun, and the action is pretty good. The sound is done pretty well with good voice acting, but some of the voices are a little too cliche and over the top. The Graphics aren't bad but they aren't great, although I don't hold that too much against most RPGs because they don't need the greatest graphics to be a good game.
