User Review: Battle Realms
It’s been a while since we’ve seen one of these, but reader carefulconan has put together a nicely constructed spanking of Asian style RTS Battle Realms - what he calls a “whim spending tragedy”.
Christmas has arrived and after finishing Return To Castle Wolfenstein a few times I thought it was time to put something new in my stocking. Not relying on the fatman for anything these days (I’m 27) I headed to the shops and came home with, you guessed it, another dud.
After reading a positive review from one of Australia’s popular PC games mags I popped down the shop and spent 80 bits on Battle Realms. First opinions: well it looks pretty damn good. The maps are all fully rendered 3D action with mountains and waterfalls, jam packed with great textures and lots of colour. The characters are well animated if a little simple in their construction. So overall its all very pretty.
Gameplay… yes, things go downhill pretty much from here.
You get loaded with the Asian equivalent of Days of Our Lives as your character Kenji wanders around the beautiful maps looking for NPC’s to interact with and villagers he can subjugate and train into warriors. The commodites of water and rice are the backbone of your community and any villagers found idle are yours to draft into your fighting force.
What now? Upgrade of course!. Like all RTS’s lately you must upgrade and pump out troops in an all too familiar formula (tank rush) specialising is an expensive and laborious procedure requiring, you guessed it, more water and rice. Overall the game plays really slowly. What ever AI is present is pretty laid back. Don’t expect to be swarmed by the oppostion, he’s waiting for the rice to grow too.
So to sum up I was dissapointed. I spent 80 bucks on what for all purposes is a bad attempt at Command and Conquer in a Kimono. The real tragedy is the magazine that gave this game a score of 91 out of 100 has completley lost my faith. So if you value 80 bits as much as I do steer clear of Battle Realms and read reviews with a sceptics eye.
posted by carefulconan · at 11:04 am · filed under Reviews
“read reviews with a sceptics eye.”
Yes goood advice, and I emplore you all to do the same with this review. This is one of the most beautiful games to date. I feel Mr Carefulconan was doing a bit of comparing apples and oranges here, it’s not like C&C at all, other than the RTS part.
“Asian equivalent of Days of Our Lives ” - Read Story line. You remember those right?
True it probally does have it’s faults, but I emplore everyone to at least play the demo, and decied for yourselves.
It seems like you don’t like most games, you should buy your games from EB, because then you can take them back, when you don’t like it.
Everyone else, if you want a bit of a different lean on your RTS’s, go for Battle Realms, it really is worth the 91% the said mag gave it.