An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is a spin-off from the famous Elder Scrolls series of RPGs by Bethesda Softworks. It first came out in 1997 – between Daggerfall and Morrowind – and is an MS-DOS-based action/RPG with fairly primitive 3D graphics.

What Battlespire does is take the dungeon-crawling aspects of Daggerfall and make it the focus of this game. There are no shops, so you can’t sell things (a real pity because you acquire tons of stuff, which you just have to leave behind as you progress), and dialogue is limited to the odd friendly character.

When I first played Battlespire I didn’t like it at all. I thought the controls and interface were clunky, and the game seemed very basic. I felt the same about Morrowind when I first played that… How wrong I was about that game! And Battlespire is actually pretty good when you get into it – certainly better than Redguard, anyway. It’s no Morrowind, though.

Like most RPGs you have to gain a foothold to start reaping the rewards of the game. That means getting used to the dodgy mouse-based combat and extremely limited inventory capacity. Once you do gain a foothold, you’ll probably realise that there’s more to Battlespire than meets the eye.

More: Battlespire on Wikipedia
Steam: Battlespire on Steam
GOG: Battlespire on GOG.com