Posted on: August 21, 2023

Fake-Smarts

Games: 38 Reviews: 25

Mediocre Action for TES Fanatics

Battlespire's original release marked a leap forward in graphics and art design for the series. However, even its best aspects would be difficult to appreciate by most players today. The gameplay is a watered-down dungeon crawl. Combat feels clumsy and is sometimes unsatisfying. The game does not offer worthwhile opportunities for role-playing outside of a Battlemage-like class with a complimentary player race choice. Several standard RPG character statistics can be neglected with no penalty. This suggests that Battlespire could have benefitted from forcing players to play with Battlemage attributes, rather than offer a false sense of freedom. Eventually I found myself enjoying the gameplay under these constraints. There did remain critical bugs that harshly impacted my experience. Also, the multiplayer component was uninteresting. The art direction of Battlespire is generally appropriate. There is a constant supply of strange and eccentric demon sprites to observe throughout the campaign. It can be gratifying to see a difficult enemy phase out of existence during their death animation. The early-3D era graphics offer some charm, aside from the serious glitches associated with level geometry. While the player character sprites can be nicely drawn, they can later get overwhelmed with ugly equipment sprites. The music is serviceable for the eerie atmosphere of the environments. It mostly consists of droning ambiance or is outright absent. The sound design is also acceptable, helping the combat to function. The story is straightforward, perhaps too much for what is considered a role-playing experience. There are a couple choices to make, but they don't affect the story meaningfully. The lore building is what drives the narrative experience, specifically for fans of the Daedra Princes and related demonic lurkings. Without the association with the franchise, this game could have been labeled shovelware. Battlespire is only recommended for dedicated fans of TES.

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Posted on: December 28, 2018

JakobFel

Verified owner

Games: 835 Reviews: 49

Different, but same

Like Redguard, I've always wanted to play Battlespire since I first became a fan of The Elder Scrolls. I knew that neither game were considered top-tier in this series but I still wanted to give them a try. Redguard has technical issues but is a great game otherwise. On the other hand, Battlespire runs really well but lacks depth. Battlespire is what happens when you take Daggerfall's amazing dungeon crawling and made a whole game around that. Make no mistake, the game does have open level design but this is a dungeon crawler RPG at its heart: the emphasis is on exploring dungeons and building up your character. This is the sort of game that a person might buy if they wanted the dungeon experience present in Daggerfall but without the overwhelmingly large open world and sandbox gameplay. In traditional Bethesda fashion, this game has its fair share of bugs but nothing too crazy. It's an enjoyable game regardless of the bugs. The gameplay is extremely similar to Daggerfall, but obviously, combat saw an overhaul since that's the focus of this one. Swinging a sword or firing a bow feels a lot more in line with 2002's Morrowind (which was a significant improvement over Daggerfall). Story-wise, this game is pretty light but there is one there. The game is more interested in building atmosphere than story. As a result, the dungeons of the Battlespire academy are impeccably creepy and enjoyable to explore. The art style does a great job of capturing the essence of what this game is all about. I haven't finished the game yet and probably won't for some time but I've played it enough to know that if you enjoyed Daggerfall's dungeon crawling and can't get enough of it, this game might be worth the purchase. However, if you're expecting a smaller version of a traditional Elder Scrolls experience, you'd probably be better off just sticking with the main games or maybe the mobile game, The Elder Scrolls: Blades.

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Posted on: August 11, 2019

lolinc

Verified owner

Games: 68 Reviews: 4

A Unique Experience in the TES series

Battlespire used Bethesda's own DOS-based XnGine video renderer, which was occassionally susceptible to clipping and collision-detection errors in the game environment. At any rate, keeping this limitation in mind while navigating yields relatively few issues, as it becomes pretty much second-nature where and when these issues arise. The innovative jumping feature in Battlespire helps the PC avoid a lot of frustration from this issue. Battlespire is commonly described as a dungeon-crawler; but this is not really the case: you're in a massive tower filled with very diverse corridors, chambers, entrance-halls, etc.; sometimes you are transported to distinct realms that are expansive and open -- it's a chaotic and whimsical wizard's tower, after all. Melee/magic, effects/outcomes are basically what one would expect with this video-renderer: occassionally unpredictable and quirky. But what makes Battlespire so impressive, and so atmospheric, is the contemplative, charismatic, and diabolical motives of its denizens (primarily the Daedra, an omnipresent, praeternatural faction, who keep the dullards of Tamriel on their toes): NPCs are relevant and substantial; they are not merely hyperbolous, interactive props who grant access from point A to point B. Each has their own voice, dialect, and personality. The evirons are very immersive. The music (Absolute Pitch) is varied and appropriate. . . outstanding, actually. All these aspects are encapsulated within a good story. Julian LeFay had such an incredible talent for the mercurially wondrous. I think Battlespire was his final major contribution to the TES series. Be sure to READ the manual, and the accompanying readme.txt. . . The Daedra suffer no fools.

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Posted on: August 21, 2025

Lime_Juice4

Verified owner

Games: 145 Reviews: 26

Interesting, but janky and band gameplay

In my quest to play through all the Elder Scrolls games, I knew I would come across this game too. Now that I've played through it too, I can see why it wasn't a great success. The game actually adds value to the lore and world of Elder Scrolls. It goes into great detail about the Daedra and their clans and deepens their history in the world. Without these approaches in Battlespire, there would certainly be no TES IV: Oblivion. And the game goes deeper into their philosophies and customs than Oblivion ever did. Here, every enemy is also an NPC with fully voiced dialog. But what's so bad about the game? Battlespire is in a technically desolate state. These include some small but also fatal bugs that can ruin your progress if you don't attach much importance to backup saves. What's more, some of the levels have platforming passages frequently. The jumping mechanic in this game is partly a dice roll. So it can happen that the character simply jumps and misses its target or get stuck on an edge. Most of the time you can't get away from it, so you have to reload. Also a annoying feature of the game is the fact that enemies can knock you away. In this case, it can happen that you are knocked back meters, sometimes even down chasms. My last point concerns the dialog and the ability to talk to enemies. It's a great idea, no question and sometimes it's necessary to get tips on how to progress, but in reality I don't think it helps. Of course, if you're open to dialog, you get a bit more lore, but most enemies of the same type talk the same stuff and you often present less variation. And looking for unique npc is a pain because they all look the same. Even though the game takes an interesting approach and contributes a lot to the lore, it was just a lot of work for me to finish the game. I can only recommend it to hardcore fans for whom the story is important enough to subject themselves to such suffering.

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Posted on: June 5, 2017

yeoldetoaste

Verified owner

Games: 275 Reviews: 1

An Ingenious, Rewarding Survival RPG.

Although it's a mess at times, this game is one of the best games I've ever played and a true testament to treating the player like a mature, intelligent adult. As a player works his way through the huge levels, a lot of brain power and exploration is required to meet the requirements to make it to the next level. Your patience will be tested, but if you persevere, you'll be rewarded with something that is very rare in games these days: a sense of intellectual accomplishment. The game is about resource management and puzzle solving with waves and waves and waves of enemies thrown at you. Of course, this is where the game gets frustrating and loses its fun value. The enemies are very hard to kill and you will die hundreds of times without question. Sometimes it's a matter of reloading and hope the virtual dice are in your favour for damage received and given, sometimes it's a matter of reloading and changing your weapons and tactics, and often it's a matter of reloading and hoping your enemy gets stuck in a wall. If you’ve played Arena and Daggerfall, you’ll handle the battle just fine – just remember to save every 15 seconds. There are no waypoints flashing or narrators telling you what to do, so you genuinely feel just like the protagonist of the game and that’s the exceptional brilliance of the game: you're thrown into the fight for the Battlespire with not much more than your staff in your hand and you're expected to find the equipment and supplies you need to survive. Getting through a level is hard, but for the most part fair and logical. (To my shame, I consulted a walkthrough twice and in both instances I told myself, “Are you kidding me? That’s the solution?”) The game is far from perfect, but I cannot recommend it enough.

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