Brave: A Warrior's Tale
Score: 53% ESRB: Everyone 10+ Publisher: Southpeak Interactive Developer: Evolved Games Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Platformer (3D)/ Adventure
Graphics & Sound: You can tell that Brave: A Warrior's Tale has aspirations to be a pretty game, but the execution falls pretty far from that. Characters are blocky and look as if they've had a few too many bee stings to the face. Environments are often a boring, blocky expanse of the same texture and color. More confusing is the fact that the scale of the environment seems gigantic. Is this supposed to be a game about Lilliputian Native Americans? The graphics have other problems. Much of the character animation is jerky, but in fact, the entire screen will jerk around so often that you'd think your poor Wii was secretly trying to run Crysis in the background. Climbing up vines is one of the worst examples: tap left and then right (not even that quickly) and you'll get a spastic flurry of arms and legs. There are instances of things, things very important to your progressing through the game, disappearing altogether. See those giant mushrooms that you need to bounce off of in order to avoid a quick death with the forest floor? No, neither do I, but just believe in them and you'll be fine. Some of the voices are decent, but some are just your average, low-budget cartoon quality. Of course, it doesn't help that no one has anything interesting to say. The character Brave endlessly exclaims "Cool!" after just about everything. Besides that, typical conversation goes something like the following: "I'm looking for Spirit Dancer." "Oh yes, I knew Spirit Dancer. I will tell you where he is, but first kill all of this stuff." Other than that, you've got a background score with the expected drum and flute elements (to represent Native American music), but nothing that's too impressive or moving. When enemies appear, you get some "dread"-inducing movie style music, but it sounds oddly serious and out of place in this game.
Gameplay: First off, Brave: A Warrior's Tale is a revamp of a PS2 game we previously reviewed called Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer. Story is very much a case of run and slay x number of these monsters, collect x number of these items, then come back. At first, you start out by seeking out cave paintings. Through the cave paintings and conversation with an elder named Grey Bear, you learn the story of the warrior/shaman named Spirit Dancer. Years ago, he saved your village from a terrible evil force called Wendigo. Now Wendigo is back, and you need to find Spirit Dancer again. It takes a frustratingly long time for anything to get rolling in this game. You soon learn that whenever you're asked to do something, it's going to come in at least 3 parts. Kill 3 beetles, find 3 totem sections, kill all the wolves: that's going to be your life. You're not given much in the way of interesting sidequests. Though you can find secret totems, it only unlocks artwork. This isn't the prettiest game, so the motivation for finding artwork isn't that high. And you know all those "cool" powers you're supposed to get during the game like possessing animals and performing spells? Most of those are linked to plinths, so you can only use them in certain battles that were designed for their use. So even though you can become a powerful bear, you can pretty much only do it for one fight in one specific area. There also is no manual save option, which is frustrating because it's a little unpredictable as to when the game will autosave. You can tell by an hourglass that shows up in the corner of a screen that a save has been made. This is not described in the manual. In fact, in the manual you're told that you can save and load a game at any time from the Pause menu. As far as I can see, this option has been removed from the final product.
Difficulty: Brave: A Warrior's Tale is not a difficult game, it's just taxing on the mind to try to force yourself through it. The only element of difficulty you can tweak is the hint system. You can ask the game to give you more or fewer hints about what to do next. Basically, the hint system is your village elder Grey Bear speaking to you through a magical stone. The hint system works, progressively giving you more specific hints as you take more time in trying to solve a particular problem. And sometimes, it doesn't work at all and you'll get your hints from Grey Bear embarrassingly late. Thanks for letting me know I'm supposed to climb the tree that I'm already climbing, grandpa. Combat is not difficult. Button-mash away and you'll be able to dispatch most enemies easily. Only a few enemies require a special strategy or weapon to defeat. The real difficulty of this game is figuring out how to make sense of the controls and the graphics. There are blind corners that will get you automatic damage unless you know what's coming already. There are areas where you cannot avoid damage due to unresponsive controls. There's just generally a sense of arbitrary consequences to your actions. How should you deal with enemies that practically tear you apart when you're on the ground and vulnerable? Most enemies don't do a great amount of damage, so it's not a matter of being killed too easily, it's just a matter of being annoyed by it.
Game Mechanics: The first thing you check out in a 3D platformer is the camera controls. You want to be able to line yourself up, look around easily and quickly, and pull it all together with your character's movement. Well, don't worry about that with Brave because there are no camera controls. I guess someone was thinking one step ahead here: I can't criticize what's not there, right? Ok, you can enter a first person view that will allow you to look around, but you're stuck in place while you do this. Also, even this modicum of control fails, as the camera will sometimes wildly pan or refuse to move in a certain direction. Other than that, you can indeed re-center the camera on Brave while you're in action, but often it likes to play stubborn and look at only what it wants to look at. This results in the inevitable walking on eggshells feeling you get when you can't walk a straight line or make a jump because of the awkward angle. There's also camera control while in the water, so swimming is always the fun experience of trying to get to a destination effectively blind. Controlling Brave feels like an exercise in faith. Movement is sloppy, distances can be hard to judge, and glitches are easy to come by. Mercifully, the motion controls are only called into play much later in the game. For the most part, you'll only use the buttons and directional pad to do everything you need to do. Brave: A Warrior's Tale represents the worst in the 3D platforming genre. It's frustrating, unrewarding, and repetitious. For a game that relies so heavily on its mechanics (no one filled in the gaps with story or graphics here, folks), it fails greatly in that respect. There's a nice niche that could be filled by games themed on Native American culture and its rich history, so it's really a shame to see one be so bad.
-Fights with Fire, GameVortex Communications AKA Christin Deville
Related Links: Southpeak Games Official Page Game Vortex's review of Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer
Wolfenstein Groovin' Blocks