The Bard’s Gold

What do you get when you throw a bard into an action/platformer on the Nintendo Switch? Let’s find out in my review for The Bard’s Gold!

The Bard’s Gold is an action/platformer with some rpg elements. There isn’t much of a story; Bard’s Gold focuses on its gameplay.

Three difficulty settings are provided: Normal, Retro Mode, and Rogue-Lite. Normal is probably the easiest setting but does come with some drawbacks. In normal mode, the player is only given three lives at first but checkpoints let you go back to the level you died in. Meanwhile Retro Mode gives you only two lives and still has checkpoints. Rogue Lite gives you a health bar instead of lives. You can take damage but once you die, you’ll have to go back to the beginning of the game.

Once you die for good in The Bard’s Gold, its game over. You’ll be able upgrade your health a bit (and other upgrades if you’re lucky) and that’ll carry over to your next playthrough. That said, you’ll be seeing a lot of the beginning of the game. The upgraded health will help you get further each time, but there is a lot of repetition to this game.

The Bard’s Gold has pretty simplistic gameplay: you can jump and throw your weapon at enemies. You collect jewels to upgrade your health and buy temporary powerups.

It would have been nice if there was an easy mode where you could save and go back to the level you last died in, instead of having to go all the way back to the beginning. The health upgrade system makes you feel like your last playthrough wasn’t a complete waste of time, but the game is still very hard and mostly unsatisflying.

The controls in the Bard’s Gold are fine. This game does not make use of the Switch’s touch screen or motion controls. Just about anybody who has played a platformer before will be able to easily play this game. Its not an easy game but it thats not because of the game’s controls. The Bard’s Gold is just difficult.

And finally, the game’s graphics are very simple.As simple as some of the classic online slots games used to be. The Bard’s Gold could have been a 3DS game.

The Bard’s Gold is not a horrible game. Its simple graphics and gameplay are not the worst I’ve seen. And some players will like how difficult the game can be, while others will be turned off by having to repeat the same levels over and over. The Bard’s Gold can be fun, but overall, I found it to be too repetitive and difficult.

The Bard’s Gold gets a 7.0 out of 10.

A digital code was provided for this review. The Bard’s Gold is now available on the Nintendo Switch eshop