Barony is a third person dungeon crawling roguelike game. You may pick one of a dozen or so classes (more with the DLCs), and with the DLCs you can play as one of eight monster races, and then set off into the dungeon of the titular Baron.
This will be familiar to people who have played games like Nethack, with sinks and fountains and piles of cursed items, but it is far more of an action game, with enemies (and yourself) that move and fight in real time. You can fight with melee weapons, shoot ranged weapons, or use magic (with a limited mana pool that regenerates fairly quickly, but not quite fast enough that you don’t start to feel it if you rely on it too much – which of course, wizards do). The central “twist” relative to most games of the genre is that it takes the levelling system from Skyrim and similar games, where doing an action more often will level your ability at it. Of course, the system isn’t very deep – there’s just weapon skills, a magic skill, a casting skill (yes, two magic skills – one determines mana regeneration and mana pool size,
This is one of those games that feels like it is half inventory puzzle – you find far more stuff than you can conceivably carry, but at the same time as you go through the dungeon you find shops that you can sell stuff to in order to buy stuff from. This is honestly the worst thing about the game, as it isn’t fun to do this and your inventory is likely to become increasingly clogged the deeper you get into the dungeon. It just ends up being tedious, all the more so because picking up items and identifying them levels one of your skills used for identifying items, which is very useful.
The actual enemies are not tremendously interesting, being pretty basic and having few attacks. There is a different little timing sequence to each of them, and some have special attacks, but in the end, you will fight them a lot and the variation is not huge.
As you go deeper into the dungeon, you increasingly gain the ability to dig through walls, levitate over pits, walk on water (and lava), and otherwise exploit the environment to your advantage. You get better items (though they are just reskinned versions of lower level items, with the exception of a tiny number of “legendary” items) and grow more powerful as you level up and get better equipment.
Unfortunately, runs in Barony are quite long; it took over 7 hours in a single run to win the game, and if you die, you have to start over. This makes dying really hurt, especially later on in the dungeon, as you lose a lot of time. If you are playing multiplayer, it stings a lot less; in multiplayer, everyone has to die to game over, as if there is at least one survivor, you can go to the next floor and everyone will respawn. This makes the game much, much more tolerable in multiplayer.
It is pretty repetitive to play repeatedly, and while the classes play a bit differently, in the long run, the mechanics are not really diverse enough to support more than a handful of real archetypes, with most blurring together by the end.
In the end, I would not really recommend playing this by yourself, but if you have a group of friends who are playing it, you will probably have some fun getting through it at least once.
2.0