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Undoubtedly delivering a full-featured dungeon-crawling experience, its complexity can also be its weakness depending on tastes
Games like Barony are always a challenge for me to review since my feelings on it are quite mixed. On the one hand, I applaud the fact that it feels like an effort that absolutely represents the vision of the developers, who were obviously looking to build a challenging, deep, and reasonably varied first-person dungeon crawler like no other. On the other, those same features may make the frustration factor high for people seeking a quicker fix or who are used to more streamlined game systems and play. Make no mistake, the early going here is bumpy and takes longer than you’d likely expect as there’s just a lot to digest and understand. This is exacerbated a bit by controls that I wouldn’t necessarily consider to be ideal and/or comfortable, especially since the need to swap between weapons or other elements is pretty high but the means for doing so isn’t always ideal. Due to the pretty high bar of knowledge and experience to get rolling I also find the multiplayer element to be a bit odd, as a single person working through all of the tutorials would be one challenge, finding up to 3 friends who are also excited about that as a task seems like a tall order for the typical person. If this complexity and depth sounds like the thing you’ve been looking for amidst a sea of more action-oriented fare this may be just what you’re looking for. Otherwise, you may want to take a long look and review what it is you’re looking for in your experience before taking the plunge.
Justin Nation, Score:Good [7.1]