It's a first-person 3D dungeon crawler, you just kill stuff there isn't much more to it, there is some mazes/puzzles as I remember though. You control a party of 6 characters which you create at the start, you can choose their race, skills etc. Movement is smooth (not grid-based) but when you get in range of an enemy it snaps into turn-based. Combat is like Wizardry/Bard's Tale as you said, you give orders to all your party and then you start turn and they execute them. You can choose different types of attacks like "Attack for Vitals" and "Berserk Attack" etc which have different strengths and resistances associated with them. You can also cast spells.
As you said the game takes places in a fantasy world which is in a "Steam Age", you start off with standard weapons like spears, swords, axes, halberds, bows, but the most expensive weapons late in the game are primitive gunpowder weapons. My mind might be playing tricks, but I think there's a unbalanced-as-fuck machine-gun called a "Storm Cannon".
Game is buggy, but nothing game-breaking from what I experienced. Graphics are pretty bad environmentally speaking due the the fact that this was 1995 and they used "real" 3D, but they still used sprites for enemies though.
The game has an AWESOME manual, the game was apparently based on a P&P RPG of the same name, and the manual has little descriptions and information on everything.
Game also has a metal (yep) soundtrack, I guess they figured it would fit with "Thunder" but some of it sounds like a more subdued version of early Slayer.
EDIT: Oh and apparently their was also three Thunderscape books published all around the same time to promote the game. Probably wouldn't be possible to have them included as extras I guess. I think SSI planned World of Aden to be their next big thing after they lost the D&D license to Interplay, but it didn't sell well and the rest is history.
Post edited August 20, 2013 by Crosmando