History books tell us that Joan of Arc was a pretty serious young woman. The poor French shepherd-turned-crusader was fanatically devout--she was said to have heard voices in her head that encouraged her to fight for Charles VII and to liberate Orleans and the Loire valley--as well as conservative to the point that she forbade her troops to use profanity. She wore men's clothing, and she was eventually burned at the stake as a heretic. That doesn't exactly fit the profile typically associated with computer game heroines, who can often be found sporting chain-mail bikinis and who certainly never end up getting burnt to a crisp.

Enlight's upcoming game lets you play as the sword-slinging heroine Joan of Arc.

It's not surprising, then, that Enlight Software isn't being too strict about authenticity in its upcoming game based on the life of this unusual historical figure. Judging by the early version of Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc that we've been playing for the past couple of weeks, the Hong Kong-based developers will apparently make Saint Joan out to be more Lara Croft than frumpy Christian martyr. At this point in development, the game looks like a fairly conventional third-person action-adventure game, albeit one with a unique protagonist who can also lead the charge in strategic battles.

Lead developer Trevor Chan, best known for pure strategy efforts like Capitalism and Seven Kingdoms, is trying to create a genre-bending experience that includes aspects of action, adventure, and strategy gaming. Play begins with Joan fighting with the assistance of her squire and a few allied warriors. You guide her in a third-person camera perspective just as you would the lead character in any other action adventure game. As time goes on, however, you acquire more abilities and responsibilities, just as Joan herself did during her campaigns with the French army in the 1420s. Eventually, you gain access to a real-time command interface where you take control of entire medieval battles and wage war from the general's saddle.

But unlike a lot of cross-genre gaming experiments, the game seems to attempt to ensure that all aspects of play are fully realized. Even though the default control system is the standard WASD mouse-and-keyboard setup used in almost every third-person game these days (you can also use a gamepad), the action is tempered with lots of role-playing touches. Energy points are used to dictate the availability of your attack options, so you can't repeatedly charge into the fray and slice up foes without a care for your stamina. Joan gains experience over time and levels up in various combo attacks, giving her even more choices when steel is bared. Eventually, she learns dozens of combination moves employed with a selection of nine trusty broadswords, the first with the catchy name of "The Sword of St. Catherine of Fierbois."

Defeating dozens of enemy soldiers will ultimately help Joan put the Dauphin on the French throne.

You can also develop Joan and her companions over time. Experience gained during battle provides points to boost the game's six core attributes--strength, defense, dexterity, leadership, hit points, and energy points--plus the various combo attacks, so you can custom-design your protagonist. Along with Joan, you can guide three other historical personages gradually introduced during the course of the campaign. Jean de Metz, the Duke of Alencon, and Etienne "La Hire" de Vignolles serve as her companions along the way. Each specializes in different weapons and has objectives to meet that are loosely associated with the main goal of freeing France from the English. Jean de Metz, for instance, wields the powerful Oriflamme sword and must slay the notorious de la Pole brothers. Alencon hopes to use his skill with poleaxes to reclaim his ancestral lands from the English Lord Bedford. And La Hire wages much the same struggle, albeit with a pike against an English nobleman named Talbot.