Please login to submit a screenshot

Hands up who remembers The Bard’s Tale? Good, now put your hands down, because a) you look stupid, and b) it was only a sort of metaphorical gambit designed to draw you into the review. The point I am making is that Bard’s Tale is getting on a bit. It was one of the first RPGs to reach the mainstream, but with the like of EOTB2 and the upcoming Hired Guns, it is doubtful anyone would now want to build their own dungeons, let alone find anyone else who would want to play with them.

Nevertheless, this is what BCTS is for. Entire new maps, monsters, items and spells that can be created and saved out as a complete executable game. In something approaching foresightedness on Interplay’s part, they have seen to it that you do not need a copy of the original game to run this one. Hooray.

The most interesting part is the Monster Editor, because here you can be the cruellest. You basically have to fill in the blanks and make sure you do not make the giant spider so darn tough it is impossible to kill it. Each type of monster has a picture associated with it, which can also be changed. There are about 30 preset, but you can draw your own and import them if you want something more exotic, such as a Davro Troll or That Bloke From the Werther’s Original Advert Skeleton.
When it is all working together fairly well (you can test the game at any time), choose the Build Game option and it is all saved out in one runnable lump. And that is ll there is to it.

You would have to be a pretty serious Bardhead to want The Construction Set. Planning a world is a time-consuming task, and unless you have got a friend who would want to play it, there really is not much point. Come to think of it, your friend would have to be fanatical too; the graphics and gameplay are primitive by today’s standards. And although there is nothing complicated about using The Set, its presentation is not exactly sophisticated, being mostly text-based and of a typed-in-from-a-BASIC-listing appearance.

As far as it is, BCTS is a good piece of software that does its job well, but you cannot help feeling that an Eye of the Beholder 2 Construction Set would have been a better idea.
Ed Ricketts

Verdict: 66%