I would like to alter the classification I gave it to; surprisingly immense! - as it is a necessity to any gamers life!
Q) What do I do when I am tired of all my games? A) All I have to do is get out my copy of battle realms and BANG I am no longer bored brainless.
Anyway onto the main review:
Context:
O.k this game is set in Japan I believe, and is evidently from before world travel/exploration/etc. There are four clans (dragon, serpent, lotus and wolf) each following attributes of their chosen creature… or flower. The dragons are honourable warriors, the serpents are much slyer (if that is a word) and are actually a band of thieves effectively, the lotus for some reason feel they should make themselves ill (they are practically black magicians), and the wolves are generally large people with the muscle force of giants but the mind set of four year olds, meaning they prefer brawl over brains…and actually come to think of it the lotus generally oppose this preferring brains over brawl, oooh revelations readers, just realised they may be trying to prove the will of the mind stronger than the physical reality by making themselves ill! Yes. That must be it. Be it that or else they are just a tad odd…or a bit of both…hmmm
..ANYWAY:
This game is a kind of RTS thing. Basically you can first choose a clan to play with (each different in their own special ways), then you build you ‘settlement’ and build up an army, then go out and try to beat everyone else before they beat you. You can however do loads of other things. There are heroes to summon, upgrades to learn and a unique hierarchy for each clan to go through. Part of the beauty of this game is that it is just that simple, there are no extra complex things to understand, just three resources (rice, water, and yin/yang).
This game has a skirmish option for quick battles, a tutorial mode to teach you the gameplay rules (surprising that!) and like most RTS games it also has a story mode: this is the hard bit to the game, it is in essence a set of skirmishes with several limitations and options for you to choose from that affect the rest of the story mode (e.g. do you take path a or path b?). Now an analysis of each review feature:
Lets start with the negatives.
Graphics:
The graphics unfortunately leave much to be desired. The game uses basic 3D shapes to build the characters and is merely coloured accordingly. But this does lead to a mega positive: it does reduce the in-game loading time (this is on my rubbishy computer upstairs), and so consequently gameplay is greatly improved which lets you get on with the important bit…playing! Other than that I have little else to say in this area And now the positives-
Gameplay:
GREAT, occasionally this will slow when there is an entire army on screen but apart from that there is nothing wrong here. Sound:
Battle Realms has a wide selection of different backing pieces that play throughout, each is relative to something, some relate to clans whilst others inform you of battles etc. Naturally it is all in context. Lovely. Value:
Oh it is indubitably immensely superbly amazingly spectacularly good value! I got my copy for £3.99 – what a bargain! I will however stress that this is one of the features that make it so brilliant, as it is cheap I am very pleased with it, and even for the hours upon hours of fun I have on it I wouldn’t recommend paying more than £20 (think that’s about $35-ish) for it :( WHY? Because when I pay the extra £10+ for a game I am really doing so for the graphics as I expect the fun to be packed into that first 20 quid…
Reviewers tilt:
I scored this at full to achieve that 9/10 score as truly this game is quite brilliant!
Hope that helped
Woodchip50