An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire

In Battlespire, touching a wall might get you stuck in it and touching the ceiling might freeze the game. Floors are generally safe, except in a few places, where they make you take damage. In Battlespire, you can access four inventory tiles at once. You scroll up and down one click at a time, one box at a time. You can make things easier by putting things in containers, or possibly by putting containers in containers in containers. I once found a javelin wrapped in three levels of sacking. In Battlespire, you shouldn't save on Level 5. It might permanently corrupt all of your savegames. While you're there, avoid one of the shacks in town, because as best as I can tell no-one's ever made it inside without their game crashing. In Battlespire, you spend your time pursuing and eventually rescuing a man or woman who leaves you notes throughout. This person may or may not be your romantic partner. It's not especially clear. In Battlespire, possibly the best armor in the game is the Armor of the Savior's Hide. I say "possibly" because there's no actual way to check, and to this day nobody knows what its enchantments actually do. Battlespire features nudity on four of its seven levels. If you play a female character, it can feature nudity on all of them. An interesting game to play while enjoying Battlespire is to guess which bugs were added when the game was brought onto newer systems and which were present in the original release. The answers may surprise you. I can't promise you'll enjoy absolutely anything about Battlespire, but I can promise you that you won't forget it.

Now acknowledged by GOG (see my ticket response below) this game has bugged controls that cause you to move to the side when you move forward and back, the degree and direction of which changes based on which compass direction you are facing. For example, face north and then move back only, you will move diagonally to the southwest. Some seem to experience this worse than others, but I have tried it on 3 PCs on 3 operating systems and it's the same on all 3. Buy at your own risk only if you can stand a control scheme that messes with you differently n a constant basis. It may not bother some people, but it's there. Reply to my ticket regarding this issue: "Unfortunately this is a known issue with the game, and every time you will press down arrow to go backwards your character will move slightly to the right as well. Some of our users informed us that they were able to bypass this issue, by using arrow keys on numpad, but unfortunately I'm not able to confirm this, because on our test PC's this issue still persisted."

Battlespire is something of a far cry from other entries into the Elder Scrolls series. Unlike Arena or Daggerfall, or later games in the series, Battlespire is mainly a dungeon crawl with a healthy dose of RPG elements. Positives: Great dialogue Decent combat Strong character creator Decent variety of enemies and environments Sense of accomplishment and achievement Negatives: Plenty of bugs Horrendously difficult Useless stealth/magic (aside from healing) Items look almost identical (iron sword looks exactly like Daedric sword) Verdict: If you like older Elder Scrolls games, you may be surprised at how quirky and fun Battlespire can be, but bugs are common and difficulty higher than any other ES game. If you're not a hardcore fan or the series, or have much experience with older, more difficult games, then you may be better off giving this a miss.

This game is hard. I remember years ago trying to climb to the top of the tower and every level got harder and harder. I practically ripped my hair out at one point after being killed by some scorpion looking, sword wielding monsters until I finally had to give up for the sake of my sanity. ...of course, I never learn and I'm so glad it's released on GOG now so I can drive myself crazy again 20 years later. It's an intense ride. Don't look for an easy afternoon gaming experience here. The combat is very physically oriented so you will be moving left, moving right, OUCH they got me again!