Designer Trevor Chan has a reputation for making strategy games that slip under most people's radars but deliver very good gameplay experiences. In particular, though they might not have been best-sellers, Chan's Seven Kingdoms and Capitalism games earned great reviews from critics and strategy fans alike. Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc represents Chan's first foray into the action genre. While it does incorporate strategy elements, the game is mainly an arcade action offering about France's most famous heroine. Though we wanted to like Joan of Arc, we found it burdened by a number of rookie mistakes, including a bad camera, poor pathfinding, and lackluster artificial intelligence.

Every French maiden-turned-warrior-general wants a pony to ride in to battle.

With its emphasis on combo moves and hack-and-slash gameplay, Joan of Arc bears a lot of resemblance to the Dynasty Warriors action games for the PlayStation 2. In fact, it feels very much like a console-style action game, and Enlight actually does have plans to publish an Xbox version of Joan of Arc later this year. Though there's nothing wrong with this, you might get the impression that Joan of Arc was designed first and foremost as a console game, rather than having taken advantage of the PC platform's unique advantages.

You'll play as Joan of Arc and several other famous French military commanders of the era. The action takes place mainly from a third-person perspective--though you can switch to first-person when using ranged weapons like longbows and crossbows--and you spend most of the game running around looking for mobs of English soldiers to slay. These include pikemen, macemen, knights, and the dreaded longbowmen. Even though you'll often find yourself facing 30-to-1 odds or greater, you can usually beat all of your foes relatively easily. The key is in using combo moves and special attacks to keep knocking your foes down. Once they're down, you can use other combo moves to deliver killing blows.

The combo moves are rather easy to execute, and there are no mouse gestures required, like in the Jedi Knight games. All you need to do is click the left and right mouse buttons in certain sequences. As Joan gains experience over time, she can learn new combo moves, enhance old ones, or improve her stats and hit points. The combat definitely has a Diablo-like feel to it. Any time your health drops, you can pause the game by accessing your inventory. Then you can eat a loaf of bread or a fish, which restores your hits points. You can then unpause the game. It's the equivalent of hitting the F1 key to quaff a healing potion in Diablo during the middle of a fight.

The game takes place over eight missions, which doesn't sound like a lot, but these are huge missions. The latter ones average between three to five hours apiece, since you usually have multiple towns, villages, cities, and castles to liberate, as well as hundreds of Englishmen to kill. While the levels are huge, there are also invisible walls everywhere that limit where you can go. For instance, you can't go over a hill, even if the slope isn't that steep. Rather, you have to follow the path around it. Similarly, you can't cut straight through a forest. Instead you have to follow the mazelike paths through it. Everywhere is the invisible hand of the designer, who forces you to follow his path. It can be frustrating when you have to go around an obstacle that shouldn't be an obstacle in the first place.

Joan and her men find themselves outnumbered after storming the walls of a city.

The camera tends to be one of the most important elements in third-person action games. You don't even notice the camera if it works well, but if it works badly, you curse it a lot. The camera in Joan of Arc works rather well when the action takes place out in the open, though it does have the occasional nasty habit of suddenly cutting to a different angle in the middle of a fight. This, of course, causes you to momentarily lose your orientation. Aside from this minor annoyance, the camera has serious problems when combat takes place in the close confines of a city or a forest. It constantly swings around to different angles in a sudden, jarring, and dizzying manner. Solid objects, like walls and roofs, often swing into view and block the action. Though sometimes they're made semitransparent, they're still not transparent enough to actually allow you to discern what's going on. The only way out is to keep hacking-and-slashing so that you can bust out into the open, where the camera will return to normal.