51. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III - Switch
52. Star Control Origins: Earth Rising - PC
53. Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX - Switch
54. Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith - PC
55. Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls - PS3
56. Silicon Zeroes - PC
57. Warcraft - PC
58. Serious Sam 3: BFE - PC
59. Wasteland 3 - PC
60. Iron Harvest - PC
61. Serious Sam 3: Jewel of the Nile - PC
62, Homeworld Remastered - PC
63. Homeworld 2 Remastered - PC
64. Offworld Trading Company - PC
65. F-Zero - SNES
66. F-Zero X - N64
67. Gauntlet (2014) - PC
68. Gauntlet Legends - Arcade
69. Halo 3: ODST - PC
70. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - PS4
71. Star Wars Squadrons - PC
72. Serious Sam 4 - PC
73. The Bard's Tale - PC
74. The Bard's Tale II - PC
75. The Bard's Tale III - PC
76. The Bard's Tale IV - PC
After the success of the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter inXile decided to bring back another classic game, this time Bard's Tale. Which makes it the largest gap between video game sequels ever. Unlike Might & Magic X, which starts off with a base of M&M 4+5, BT4 is more of a spiritual sequel on the gameplay side (and a direct sequel story side). Personally, I think that's to its detriment, but my opinion is probably biased from having just played the first three games and expecting something hewing a bit closer.
Bard's Tale IV is set 150 years after the trilogy and the intro makes mention of their three villains having been seeing an ultimate power which will be the focus of the fourth game. In the time since an oppressive religion has rolled into Skara Brae and started oppressing spellcasters and the non-human races. This plot thread isn't really followed up on, it seems to mostly just be an excuse to force you to move in certain areas. You quickly have to abandon the main Skara Brae for the old town underneath it which happens to be the town from the trilogy; even the layout is similar and you visit some familiar locales. You learn of the big bad trying to get the evil power and you venture forth to stop them; first under Skara Brae and then out in the wilderness.
The game is still in a first person perspective, but now it is no longer a grid based dungeon crawler (though you can turn on grid movement it is clunky and not worth it). You still tend to be in fairly narrow areas, but they are a bit more naturalistic. Sometimes it's within buildings, sometimes its out in the open air. There are no random encounters; there are fixed enemies who are engaged when you run into them (and you can attack first to get the first attack) and they do not respawn, outside of certain story-mandated respawns. Exploration is heavily puzzle based; when you aren't fighting you're having to do some sort of puzzle. The game does a good job of teaching you; you will get easy versions of a type of puzzle first but over time they get harder and harder. So you've learned the rules by the time you need to get good at it. The puzzles also extend to the inventory; certain weapons can be made stronger by solving puzzles on them (though they end up generally not being as good as regular weapons in the long run).
The combat is dramatically changed from the original. You now have an eight square grid on each side which combatants can move around on. Each side gets a number of action points which are consumed to take actions. This can be attacking or moving around the grid. Attacks have specific ranges; generally these are "first enemy in a column up to a maximum range" (the latter of which means your back row can't hit their back row) but sometimes you can target specific enemies. Some attacks have a wide sweep and others can choose from either the column in front of you or the ones to the sides. Each character can equip up to four attacks and can freely swap them outside of combat. These slots will get taken up by special attacks on certain powerful weapons, so you have to account for that.
Unfortunately, the way combat ends up rolling out it ends up giving you many more clicks but doesn't really get more interesting. There is a dearth of multi-hitting stuff so combat comes down to rending armor (if applicable) and then dropping your biggest attacks on each enemy. Every combat is very samey, and unlike the old games it doesn't go fast. At least with the old games you could just mash confirm to attack everything or quickly nuke everyone with your magic. Here magic is much more limited because spell points must be built up fresh every combat, and the main damage spells are late game and take a lot.
The game also has a bit of a pacing problem; multiple areas are just too long for no good reason. You could easily chop off a quarter of each section and the game would not suffer for it. I think this is exacerbated by the combat feeling samey.
But let's finish with more positive. The game has a "here's what you were doing on this save file" thing, but instead of just a bit of text you instead get a short live action scene where they reenact the cover art of the first game and the bard gives a couple of sentences telling you about the quest you're on. They seem to have recorded a lot of them; even breaks after short gaming sessions would lead to new dialog. Also, the game has some awesome music. The majority is Gaelic songs with minimal/no accompaniment (though combat does have more instrumentation to go with it) that really sells the flavor of the world. And then they enshrined the events of the first three games in songs that will be sung by the NPC bard (and a recruitable bard if you leave her behind) when you visit home base (and the first game's song is the main menu music). They're some real earworms.
Overall I wonder how I would feel about the game if I had played the originals way back in the day and picked it up with only faded memories of the first three. I was hoping for a more old school experience (like how Grimlock is a modern Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder) and didn't get that. I don't regret the time I spent with it and it's a decent enough game on its own. I think I was just tainted by doing a marathon.