Barbarian

Take the dreadful Amiga game and remove the only thing it had going for it, the Graphics, and you are left with a rotten carcass of a game that has no place on the 64. Truly Awful.

This perhaps is in my top 10 worst games list, mainly through the stupid icon driven gameplay that makes an otherwise very standard arcade adventure game worse. Add the sparse and banal graphics to the mix and a truly horrid game emerges.

Without the beautiful graphics of its 16-bit cousin the boring, repetitive gameplay and fiddly controls came into sharp focus.
I didn't like it back in the day and having recently tried to replay it I still don't care for it.
4 out of 10.

This was just as bad as the Amiga version, i. E. Totally unplayable! I don't know who came up with the controls being along the bottom of the screen, but this was so fiddly it spoiled any gameplay that was there. GFX and SFX were pretty standard too.

Atari ST/Amiga game is quite nice, despite the awkward controls. On this platform it is toilet debris

@lobogris_1976: I think the issue of identical names was pure coincidence... True, on the Commie the Palace game came first, but THIS ONE was one of the first original 16bit-games (by Psygnosis, in 1987). So don't be unfair on this matter, but anyway, the game is crap on the Commie.

I never liked too much this Barbarian issue.
I remember from the days I Knowed about this game, that it tried to confuse people with the palace's superb game Barbarian... They went published in stores, around the same time(first was Palace's game), I think, maybe to take advantage from the fame of Palace's game, if not why it is the literally, exactly, the same title? The answer: publishers thinked -they got reasons to- the game was not so good to sell with a minor clearly title! Some people buyed this game thinking that it was the palace's version with another original cover...
Apart from all this, about the game we are seeing here: It's A good idea, but bad and poorly performed. It have got a medium graphics, little poor sound, technically is good, with a good story behind, difficult to play with this unplayable iconic controls,
it seems to be attractive at first (a Very good tape/disk cover), but at last, it's a big deception. 4/10

The first game I finished. I think the year was 89. I still cant forget it. Psygnosis of course great.

This was one of the best-looking AMIGA-games at the time of the launch of the A500. Naturally, it became singularly known for its appearance rather than the rather dodgy controls that did indeed seem horribly out of place, if not out of date, since cpu-mouses came to be popular then, what with the Atari ST and the AMIGA. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the C64-port was not seen as an opportunity for improvements in the controls-department. Nor did anyone bother to do decent graphics. They are average, by no means disastrous, yet surely you bought the C64-conversion because you thought it would look "almost" like the AMIGA-version. "Baal", a "Barbarian"-clone set in the future and also from Psygnosis, is a much more playable - and better looking. Speaking of controls, one certainly recalls the legendary "Revs"-human vs. Keyboard experience...

This would be a very nice game if it had a regular joy-control. It gets to advanced for such a simple hack'em game. The graphics and sound are nice but game-play is destroyed by that "new" thinking...

You know, for a strapping barbarian warrior he sure did die easily. If he so much as bumped into anything he keeled over so fast you'd think he'd been hit with 300cc's of Thorazine. Oh well, it was fun to watch, decent to play, and (for me, anyway) the source of much nostalgia.