Bard's Gold Review

"Hardcore Playthroughs"

Campaign

Bard's Gold takes aim at capturing a classic style of gameplay offering a variety of difficulty options and still challenging you no matter what you pick. It's one of those games that focuses on killing you many times while granting the ability to slightly improve your skills on each life. This isn't even full encompassing as many items or abilities collected in lives will not carry over and I'm not a huge fan of games that don't give you a fair quantity of items in the next life. It's also a pre-set campaign so the world will not change having you replay the same areas over and over with little progression depending on which difficulty you pick. The higher the difficulty, the better rewards yet there's a point where you don't get to carry things over and the game ends in that life. It's also a fairly simple game as you move through this charming pixel world hopping and shooting. There are many things trying to kill you from various floating enemies to ground foes such as blobs or even treacherous traps. Death is everywhere in the game and basically everything is always out to get you despite following simple paths. While moving through the various levels you may also come across some nice secrets, chests full of gems and a shop to buy better gear for that life.

Gameplay

It does actually look quite nice in the pixel art, but with so many of this type it does feel awfully familiar. The movement is simple allowing a double jump to get from ledge to ledge and the rooms were mostly tiny with a focus on verticality. Combat is simple focusing on throwing objects mostly and these vary with what extra items you buy from the shop keep. There are other options for upgrades and you do get lives depending on the difficulty yet death comes often. Anything and everything will try to kill you with your character not being able to withstand much damage at all.

The Conclusion

Bard's Gold is an average title, it plays fine yet is drawn back my simplicity and the repetitive nature of the title. While it aims to capture the glory of old titles not everyone cares for that sort of system these days and better rewards are needed to keep me repeating the same areas so often. If you're looking for a challenge it can definitely provide that and there's a number of difficulties that can match what skill you have. The world did look nice, but again with this art style being used so often I've basically seen all the enemies multiple times this generation on other titles. Bard's Gold works fine without being anything too unique on the market; not to be negative as it runs fine, it's just relatively boring.

Bard's Gold Review on Xbox One
Review Code Provided by Bard's Gold

Rating Overall: 5.0