I'm a fan, I truly am. The lore and game play are there. BUT, this game is unplayable on steam in it's current state. I've tried every gimmick on DOS Box to improve the frame rate, but if it doesn't fix one issue, it will create another whether it's the resolution being too small or the mouse not working or the audio cutting out. Don't expect to get past the first dremora you see as soon as you spawn. Until THEY fix the issues with the frame rate DONT BUY THIS GAME! After all it's not our job as consumers to fix the crap we buy

I'm sure you're familiar with the expression "one step forward, two steps back". Well, someone gave Daggerfall a big bottle of home-made booze, because Battlespire takes a few steps forward, but then fumbles back, sideways and every which way. Battlespire is many things: unique, captivating, stylish, fully voice-acted, full of lore, even fun. However, of all the things it is, there's one thing that Battlespire isn't: a well-made game.

Visually, if we cast aside DOSBox limitations and the fact that it runs poorly unless set up right, Battlespire really is one of a kind in the Elder Scrolls universe. Set in the eponymous Battlespire, it's not even fully in the reality of Tamriel, teetering somewhere between it, and the realm of Oblivion. A setting so out there lends itself to some truly artistic environments and this is one aspect of the game I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. If you can look past the low-res textures, the overall aesthetic is really top-notch, the Daedric architecture is foreboding, sinister and larger-than-life. The levels themselves are handcrafted and done well, and nowhere near as labyrinthian as Daggerfall, but are still more complex than the "cave with occasional side path" dungeon design that Bethesda adopted after Morrowind. The music is also very good. Daggerfall's chippy fantasy bloops and monotone dungeon drone is replaced by truly ominous synthey tracks. Even the main menu theme is incredibly eerie. The voice acting can be hit or miss, but most of it is well-made and fairly tongue-in-cheek, campy and over-the-top. Personally, I loved it, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea. One thing that did bother me, however, is the player character's responses (who are thankfully NOT voice acted). Some of them read like they were written by a high-school student. They don't sound like a character from Tamriel at all.

But beyond the one-of-a-kind façade, the game itself falls apart like your weapon after using it too much. I'll give credit where it's due first, so I can then commence the proper bashing: if everything in it worked as described, Battlespire would have the single best character creator in any Elder Scrolls game, period. While similar to Daggerfall, it doesn't punish powerful characters by making them level slowly. Rather, it uses a point-based system that allows an incredible amount of flexibility and freedom. Disadvantages add points while advantages take them away, and you can freely spend points on attributes, health and skill increases, gear, potions, passive abilities etc., so on paper, you can start out strong if you min-max a bit. Problem is, there are a lot of ineffective skills, and some attribute and skill combos are utterly baffling (Personality governs three magic schools, Intelligence governs nothing but Critical Strike), and creating a weak character is all too easy. 
Magic, for example, is badly broken and way gimped compared to Daggerfall (and that's ignoring the AoE self-spell absorb), and I wasn't able to kill certain mobs even with 100 Destruction and 100 WIL. You can't rest, so you have to rely on potions and gems for your magicka reserve as well. Most spells are useless or weak. As someone who always mains mages, this was very disheartening, and after scouring wikis and 13 hours in, I just gave up on magic and rolled a melee and archery character so I could even beat the game.

Battlespire is hard. Incredibly, unforgivingly hard. The game advertised itself as such, to be fair, and any accompanying official documents make that abundantly clear. Even the setting and premise make it clear. You're a fledgeling Imperial Battlemage that thinks they're going for a trial run, only to be ambushed by a Daedric invasion. While all seven dungeons are handmade (and done well, mostly), the loot is still mostly random and your success will depend on luck. There are NPCs, but there are no quests, taverns, no merchants or blacksmiths. You meet Dremora in one of the first rooms in level 1. Enemies hit hard, have high resistances, and pull no punches. Even with maxed main stats, you will end combat bruised and battered by trash mobs. The puzzles require your full attention and a lot of scouring for clues - they are, however, not as obtuse as some of Daggerfall's so-called "puzzles" with ground-breaking design such as "look for a random torch to activate in order to access teleporter 4 out of a 12 teleporter sequence". If you pay attention to your surroundings and read all the relevant scrolls, you should be able to figure out what's expected of you. But you will run out of potions or arrows if you don't Scrooge McDuck your way through the game. You will get lost or wonder what to do next. You will die. A LOT.

And everytime you do, you will get booted to DOSBox and have to wait for the game to load again (by design). And then you'll reach the infamous Level 5 bug, where dying too much or exiting the game too many times bloats your savefile size, corrupting them in the process. Or you'll just get stuck on pretty much... anything when jumping. Or stuck on level geometry. Or the enemies will. Or they'll disappear. Or quest items will disappear. Or the music will! Or the water level will randomly rise after you load a game and insantly drown you even at full breath. Or some elevator platform will decide it no longer acknowledges your existence. Or you will drop an item for inventory management's sake and won't be able to pick it up again. Or the Jump icon won't appear. Or your teleport spell will ignore your anchor and teleport you into pure black. Hell, even the music, awesome as it is, doesn't loop properly. I think you get the idea. This is bad coding at its worst. Unfortunately, unlike Daggerfall, there is no Unity solution or even fan-made patches. Scouring the wikis and keeping all 8 save slots occupied is your only hope.

And ultimately, despite the intriguing and quality hand-crafted levels, despite the unique premise, setting and visuals, despite all the lore and fun it offers, for as much as I lament that it's the only level-based (i.e., not open world) Elder Scrolls RPG title, Battlespire is just too broken, too buggy and too undertuned and unpolished to be a good game, and thus, it's not game worth recommending. Again, I really can't overstate what a crying shame it is, because it can be fun, it has many good moments and cool characters. But unless you have bucketloads of patience and a willingness to start from scratch more than once, you probably won't get to those parts at all.

If you're a patient, die-hard Elder Scrolls fan, a fan of Daedric lore, and a fan of old-school RPGs and dungeon crawlers, then by all means, go for it. I am all of the above and despite the frustrating mess this game can be, I did derive plenty of fun from Battlespire. Beyond that niche, however, I just don't think Battlespire is crafted well enough to be called a good game.

Very disappointing, I was under the impression that this was a port of the game. Instead nothing more but a game being run using a DOS emulator. The store page says it has partial controller support I have yet to find a way to configure my Xbox controller.

Battlespire is an action RPG set in the world of The Elder Scrolls.
Unlike the other classic games of the series, Battlespire acts as a spin-off, the game consists of multiple levels in which you must complete multiple objective in order to progress to the next levels. There are 7 levels, you get experience when finishing a level, which you may use to increase your character's attributes and skills. This game features no quest, nor open world.

The Battlespire is a gigantic training facility for the future imperial battlemages. You incarnate an apprentice who, on the day of his final test, discovers that the entire academy has been invaded by Mehrunes Dagon and his armies of Daedras. Everyone has been slain, and your friend has been captured by Dagon himself. It is up to you to travel through the different planes of Oblivion to defeat Dagon, save your friend, and escape back to Tamriel.

• This game has excellent world building, there is lore everywhere, it is coherent, and it's fully man made! Each world is original and feel good to explore, the atmosphere is awesome, it really FEELS like you are wandering in dangerous planes of Oblivion. You have lore everywhere, through texts, flavour texts, friendly NPCS, aannd enemies!
  
  
• You can dialogue with your enemies, this is a unique game mechanic that can help you pacify some of your foes if you don't have enough health to fight. Many enemies will also give information about the world you're exploring, what is happening, what are their goals, what they think of you. And it is awesome, because each of them have their unique personalities. It is fun to speak with them.
  
  
• Humour. Battlespire likes to be silly sometimes. I burst out laughing multiple times because it's always at unexpected times. For example, Scamps are stupid little goblins, frost and fire daedras are hillarious, they are stupid brutes who keep yelling their master's name. The frost Daedras in level 5, are ultra triggered and keep yelling how UNLAWFUL their situation is. The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ INTELIGENCE TEST in level 6 which I failed, this was so silly I loved it.
  The player gets to answer stupid things too! You can be a total moron with the Daedras and that's cool. Some player see the silliness of the game as a flaw, I disagree with that. I honestly wish it was even more stupid.
  
  
• This game features good puzzles. Like the daedric alphabet one when you must use the game manual to insert a code of daedric letters, the "riddles" for the location of pieces of Savior's Hide Buuut some of these "puzzles" can be troublesome, I wouldn't even call them puzzles, I'll talk about them later.
  
  
• Level 3 and 6 musics are incredibly creepy and unsettling. Level 6 is just awesome in general. But most musics are meh.

• Movements are terrible:
  
  Straight lines are not straight, sometimes for some reason, you'll be walking at a slightly tilted angle which is deadly when you have to walk on really narrow bridges :)
  Jumping has this mega weird mechanic where you have to press longer on the jump key to jump farther away... and if you move when pressing the jump key, you make a super long jump. This is nightmarish when you have areas with holes everywhere.
  When you take damage, enemies push you away, and will make you fall if you happen to be on a platform. This would have been fair if you could do the same to them, but enemies have been coded so that they can't fall that easily.
  And finally, wall collisions, ground hitboxes, are incredibly dangerous to play with. One single miscalculated movement, and you will be STUCK in a platform or a wall. Sometimes, you'll even be stuck INSIDE a hill, with no physical means of leaving it. The only possible solution is to load a previous save.
  
  
• Softlocking is a scourge, and if you happen to be stuck because of some stupid bug, you'll be doomed if you don't have access to a previous save, this game doesn't feature a console, you can't use cheats to unglitch yourself. SAVE CONSTANTLY. You should have three save files:
  
  One you use to save all the time, a second you use to save in safe spots, a third you use to save at the beginning of each level.
  
  And if you're unlucky, you will meet nasty game breaking bugs. I encountered one of these glitch in my playthrough. It took me hours to search in forums how to "hack" the game file, and hex edit the good variables in my file so I could set my jump skill to 100 and literally jump over to the next level. Crazy stupid thing that could have been prevented with simple unclip cheats.
  
  
• Battlespire is nearly unplayable without a guide.
  This is the most frustrating thing about this game:
  
  First, Character creation is a CRUCIAL part of the game!!! As many people said, it is min-maxing. This game is hard, even with a custom optimized class (I played as a warrior). My first custom class was a disaster because I didn't know how the game works (HPs grows exponentally after each level, skills are capped by their attributes, importance of some advantages...)
  And I didn't know that in Battlespire, YOU CANNOT REST! No sleep for you, if you take damage, you will have to find a manual way of restoring your lost health points. Because of this, the Regenerate Health advantage is OP, allowing you to fully heal your character after many minutes of waiting.
  These details are crucial. If you don't take a guide when creating your class, you take the risk of softlocking yourself after some levels because enemies will kill you no matter what you do. In my case, I had to reset at level 3.
  
  Second, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ interactions. If you want to complete the game alone, without the help of a walkthrough, you literally NEED to interact with absolutely EVERY objects, details of the level, or things you encounter. I'm not talking about simply pushing buttons you find on your path. Sometimes, you have to interact with completely random elements of a room. Example: a room full with beds, all of which looks exactly the same. Turns out you could interact with one of these bed to reveal a secret underground passage, and you have many other situations like this in the game. This is stupid, and bad level design. Trying to make the game longer this way is shameful. I don't want to click on every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sprite or model of the level. So I grab a guide. And you have a ♥♥♥♥-ton of things to find in each level: keys, NPCs, informations, keys, so much keys...
  
  No one wants to spend hours clicking on every single objects of one level, how is this fun?
  Level 5 managed to make it more interesting when the location of Savior's Guide was hinted with riddles. One of the pieces is hidding behind "a curtain of water". When I read that, I remembered that the level featured a waterfall. So I went to the waterfall, clicked on it, and surprise! There was a full area hidden behind the waterfall. This felt really rewarding, I wish we had more moments like that in the game.
  
  You will need a guide to complete this game, unless you have the patience and the time to click everywhere for hours (I didn't).
  
  
• Also, not that much bad but everytime you die, the game reboots (wtf?), and, ending spoilers, man the ending feels so lazy. You talk to Dagon, show him that you have the tools to defeat him and then you face him. After hitting him once, a cinematic starts, and when it ends, the game crashes. No credits, no congratulation screen. When you beat the game, it reboots and that's it! What an unrewarding game...

Very great ideas, overshadowed by bad level design choices, and bugs.
This game really deserves a remake. I would gladly play a Battlespire Unity with a less clunky gameplay, bug fixes, more intuitive objectives, and QoL improvements.
Don't play Battlespire. And if you really want to, you should use a guide.

Year: 1997
Published & Developed: Bethesda Softworks
Genre: 1-8 Player First Person Action RPG

Originally an Expansion to Daggerfall but turned out to be a Standalone Spinoff until Morrowind was released in 1998. Its also the Second to Last DOS Game to be released with Redguard being the last DOS Game in 1998.

Enter the Battlespire as The Apprentice as you take on Jager Tharn who somehow survived that last battle back in Arena, summons the legion of Mehrunes Dagon to take over the Battlespire. Needless to say its up to The Apprentice to take the Fight to Jager Tharn & Mehrunes Dagon to retake the Battlespire in either Single Player or in Multiplayer.

While the Story is fun along with the dungeon crawls like Diablo are great, Battlespire was rushed out for a Christmas Release. As a Result, it contains several nasty bugs where if you die in a Level, the game exits out of the current game then restarts the game back to the Title Screen causing you to either start a New Game or Load a Saved Game. Worst still, there's no Open World Content as seen in Daggerfall & Arena.

I never have an issue with older games that look like ass. Older games that PLAY like ass are another matter entirely. I've played enough over the years that control just fine, that the odd one out which has a control scheme meant for crosseyed spider people and only registers commands when it feels like it can't play the "it's old, what do you expect" card. Then again, it's Bethesda, so this might just reinforce the assertion that Elder Scrolls games have always been built out of spit, cardboard and delusion.

It's disappointing, because I've wanted to play this title for years because a lot of the weirder niche elements of Elder Scrolls lore seem to stem from it. Now that I've stumbled through roughly the first third of the game, though... this is the kind of pretentious and nonsensical gibberish that the fantasy genre used to be mocked for, and it entirely lacks the atmosphere Morrowind provided to make the obtuse worldbuilding presentable.

So yeah, chucking this in the bin. Anyone else tempted to take a peak at this title out of the same desire to figure out where some of the kookiness came from... I say don't bother. Morbid curiosity only goes so far.

Very buggy and unplayable. Having reached Level 5, I have faced many save corrupting glitches, that broke my game and made me quit. Even without the bugs, the game is quite bland, where every level is basically following the same formula: find an NPC/note, collect Sigils of Entry, collect several items throughout the map, push switches and then teleport to the next level, while fighting annoying enemies. But on the positive side, the game does seem to have a potentially good story and humor and could be interesting if was remastered properly.

It's so weird seeing people recommend this game, and they have like 1 hour playtime?
Completing this is pure ball torture.

Fun fact, this game and Redguard almost put Bethesda into a pretty bad spot. And I can see why. The game feels weird. It was more of a puzzle game than a RPG. It has the things I love about Arena and Daggerfall, DND-esque character creation and having that early DOOM vibe. But I've been having technical problems which, can be fixed, but due to the fact the game doesn't interest me and I'm more invested in the mainline games (and Online). Just play Arena and/or Daggerfall Unity if you want a decently fun and challenging early Elder Scrolls game or if you are like me and recapping the series, just skip this and redguard.

No amount of humorous dialogue can make up for a game so horrifically buggy even after a handful of official patches as to be, without hyperbole, almost unplayable. When it works, it's a very mediocre dungeon crawler with poor level design and extremely lackluster combat. The only positives are a few short seconds of funny voice lines and the mercy of the game being quite short.