Well, it’s time to switch it up a bit and check out a game suitable for all ages. Brave: A Warrior’s Tale by Collision Studios is a follow-up to the enjoyable PS2 hit Brave: Search for the Spirit Dancer, and was released on August 4th. Now, I don’t have a problem playing a children’s game, heck, as far as I’m concerned, most Mario games are children’s games and those are great! But this title is so significantly flawed, repetitive and dull to the eyes; I thought I was going to throw my controller through the screen as I grinded my teeth through some of the most excruciating game play moments of my life. I can’t wait to tell you all about this super cool game!
Initially I thought that Brave was going to be a history lesson of sorts, but in the opening dialog when the characters refer to themselves as Indians instead of, I don’t know, natives or something, I just let that idea fly right out the window.
The story starts with a young Indian named Courage, sitting around the campfire with a now elder Brave, the star of the original title. To teach the children of the village to become great warriors, they must first listen to the tales of their elders. As Brave begins to tell the tale of his childhood, you takeover and being to control young brave through his early adventures. You are taken through a tutorial, which I absolutely will get to in a second, and then learn to fight off a bear. You are then sent out to continue your trials and return to the village shortly thereafter only to find a demon Wendigo attacking the tribe. Well, it’s obviously up to you, the young boy, to save your tribe and defeat the gigantic evil demon.
Greybear, the Village Elder, is Brave’s mentor who will guide him to several animal spirits in hopes of finding the great shaman Spirit Dancer in hopes that his magic will be able to save the village. Well, that’s about it. You’re on a journey to find that guy, recover some amulet pieces, run into some demons and some undead warriors, and even meet up with the Sasquatch for a quick bite of fish. Ok, the story isn’t all that bad, but the ending of the game is horrific. Not that I was expecting anything wonderful.
For the $30 price tag, you’re only going to get about 7 hours out of this title. It is single player with nothing extra in the game besides the main campaign. There are some hidden totems throughout the game that you can track down, but I certainly didn’t have the patience to try to do that.
Now the tutorial in the game was god-awful. It seemed like the developers created the game, and then quickly made a tutorial and didn’t test it or anything. It was very buggy as I continually got lost, couldn’t see what I was supposed to be doing, and even got stuck a few times by clipping through a wall I wasn’t supposed to.
To be fair, the design of the levels that follow are actually pretty decent with some pretty good challenges to face. You’ll encounter various animals to tackle as you travel through the forest, desert, snowy fields and even the spirit plane.
There is a built in hint system that eventually tells you exactly where you need to go or what to do if you die too many times or get lost. You also get unlimited lives. Achievements are very easy to earn throughout the game, heck, you get 500 points just for beating it. Speaking of, you should freaking get 500 achievement points for having to put up with the terrible tutorial.
Something that caught me out of the blue was that the game itself is really pretty easy up until the last hour or so of the game where the platforming just gets ridiculously hard. I had a lot of trouble with it so I certainly don’t see how a child is supposed to beat this game. Along those lines, half way through the final boss fight, you flash back to Courage listening to Elder Brave’s story. Brave then makes Courage go collect some totems and an amulet for some reason. Anyway, something happens where I guess the author of the story is trying to be clever, but I thought the whole sequence of events was just retarded. Don’t EVER interrupt the final boss fight to rewind and go do some stupid platforming.
Brave: A Warrior’s Tale is an easy fighting platformer. The thing that is frustrating is that while the game itself should be very easy, the games camera significantly complicates things and makes it 100 times harder. You can’t ever get it in the right spot and it really distorts your depth perception making the timing and distance of your jumps near impossible.
Aside from that, the actual game play is kind of fun. You get a tomahawk that you can beat the crap out of bugs and warriors, a bow for you to shoot wolves, and various spells to take out elemental demons. You also get to ride in a canoe a few times, fly on the back of a giant eagle, and even shape shift into a bear. These are all very enjoyable things.
Unfortunately the extremely repetitious game play ruins them. Go kill 10 wolves, go kill 3 giant bugs, go use a fire spell on 10 ice monsters etc…
In the Ice Level, you gain 2 picks that you use to climb a steep slope. This was easy the most frustrating part of the game. The mechanics of the climb are ludicrous and I just had a ton of trouble with it. From about that point on the platforming also starts to get harder. It made me just wanted to break something.
Throughout my playtime, I repeatedly tried to convince myself that the graphics in Brave were pretty. I just couldn’t do it. They are extremely dated and wouldn’t tax even a Dreamcast. On top of that, there are often very poor frame-rates, which is surprising considering the low quality of the textures. There is also a lot of in game rendered cut-scenes, and boy do they look awful.
There are also many times where there are extremely long loading times, which is also perplexing. It’s too bad, because the game idea and story actually had a lot of potential, and the developers were on the right track with the look and feel. If they would have made the graphics similar to maybe Super Mario Galaxy, I think this game would have been beautiful.
I don’t know, I just can’t recommend this game to anyone. I mean; I had an all right time playing through the middle portion of the game. You could relate this game to one of my buddy’s Halo skills; Terrible in the beginning and end, but decent between 3 and 6 beers. The graphics are very dated, the game play is repetitious and you don’t get a lot of content for your money. Brave: A Warrior’s Tale would probably be a pretty easy game if it weren’t for it’s many serious flaws. Seriously, Collision Studios, what were you thinking?
