Recent reviews by Buffrat

♿♿♿ Travelling to THE STRONGHOLD ♿♿♿

Tons of multiplayer bugs. Sometimes it takes longer to actually get into a game together than it does to complete a map. Completing a map is also difficult because sometimes your game will just brick and chain desync errors until you end it and go back to town. Check back in 6 months.

Update: Our multiplayer save has now been bugged for over a month and sits at an eternal load screen. No patches have yet fixed it.

Game is incredibly buggy and poorly optimized. You run into item combine/skill dragging/character dragging bugs every run, and sometimes your characters in the auto battler just bug out and stop casting abilities. Last run one of the events I triggered (kaiu temple - allowing the samurai I left behind to rejoin the party) causes a fatal error every time the game starts so now I can no longer even play the game without starting a new save file.

Storytelling is very meh. Painfully obvious when conversations just exist to feed the player information. Difficulty is disappointing for a strategy-type game, even on the hardest difficulty I just run my team into the enemy without much thought and it's never even close. In maps that I can split my party for more efficient clearing I often send my sword and shield character off alone to whichever side has more archers and she clears half of the map solo without requiring any healing or input from me outside of casting a skill once in awhile.

I will continue to play on the off chance the difficulty suddenly ramps up, however I am (most of the way through?) chapter 2 at this time and it is not recommended. Regardless of whether or not difficulty does increase, the first 4-6 hours should not be a snoozefest that you have to force yourself to keep playing.

I'm enjoying the game, and for the amount of content it seems to have, it's worth the price. I have two issues with it:

Master Volume doesn't affect menu or cutscene volume. The first thing I do when I start up any game is set the volume of everything to roughly 20% (in addition to my entire computer already being set to ~30%). This functions for most things in the game but during the startup menu and any of the cutscenes in the game they seem to still blast at full volume ignoring your settings.

To unlock your extras (digital content, fire horn, kael's axe, red boots, etc) you have to dig around in your steam folder (steam/steamapps/common/bard's tale/extras). I didn't see this mentioned anywhere and had to google it. Pretty silly.