Braveland

пойдет

I got this free during an event phase. I finally played, the game is short, very easy if you know this kind of games even if you choose hard. For 12.99 CAD, it is very short game and lack of content tho. Therefore, if you want to get it, just get it when it's discounted. Also very easy achievements, easily done everything in one game play.

[h1]Shallow and repetitive[/h1] Braveland is a tactical RPG developed by Tortuga Games and published by PlayPanic. It was made as a primarily mobile game and then was ported to PC. I've bought this game because I'm a huge fan of the King's Bounty series and this one is an obvious King's Bounty clone. However it pales in comparison to King's Bounty by any possible metric, and being mobile-first is not a legit excuse for that. [h2]Gameplay or lack thereof[/h2] Braveland has two interconnecting modes: adventure and battle. During adventuring, the player follows a highly linear story path, progressing by traveling between pre-defined nodes. A single node can contain either a treasure, a shop, enemy troops or an altar. The main problem appears from the very start: [i]the variability or freedom is near-non-existing.[/i] There's some semblance of non-linearity in the form of off-path nodes but it becomes pretty obvious that those nodes are either: [list] [*]Obligatory, since without them it'd be, depending on the difficulty, either impossible or extremely tedious to progress [*]Useless as they do not provide anything of importance except a few dialogue prompts. [/list] That's it. There's nothing in between. You don't really have any optional quests or encounters you can skip or ignore. You can keep an enemy encounter for later ([i] which is the optimal strategy[/i]) but apart from that there're no other real choices you can make. To top it off, the game suffers from the highly tedious backtracking implementation. When you want to buy out more units, you would have to go to one of the shops, and shops usually contain 1 or 2 of the specific units, which can also run out. In the "late" game you're forced to get through the whole map to refresh your army which can take a few minutes, and then you also have to get back... [h2]Fighting the foes[/h2] When the player attacks enemy troops, a battle starts. It is a typical for the genre, hex-based turn-based battle arena, known to anyone who's ever played any games from King's Bounty or HoMM series. What is new thing though, is almost complete lack of player agency, which is again a symptom of insufficient polishing. For example, it is impossible to change the position of your unit stack in the army or to split said stack which is [b]highly important[/b] for this genre, Among other issues there are: [list] [*]The tutorial guide shows up in the battle even if you disable it. [*]You can't do any action, including closing the game/reloading the save file until all enemy stacks have acted. But at least there's an option to speed up combat animations. [*]The unit inspection window works very strangely. Sometimes you just can't find the hitbox and have to click 2 or 3 times in a row, which is pretty annoying. [/list] You can check the upcoming turns' sequence and unit's current health bar, which is an unexpectedly good feature for a game of [i]this[/i] quality to have. The post-battle screen is also fine and pretty informative. The unit variety is OK for the game of this scope and there're some special keywords and abilities [i]that could have created enough variety[/i], if it wasn't for other, numerous problems. For example, you can't hire any enemy units, which just doesn't make sense. That limits the player to picking from the roster of seven units in total, which is too small an amount to allow for any unique strategies The decision to let the player unlock your units' abilities (for money) is interesting in theory, but the way it's done it feels clunky as well. First of all, you have to do that for almost any hireable unit, which feels lame; then, for most of the time, you get an upgrade almost immediately after getting the unit you can upgrade, which is also lame. And finally, there's no variety in that either since you do not really have any choice between different abilities or whom to upgrade first since any unit can have only a single ability and the gold is always in abudance. There's also some "bosses" but they are bosses only in name since it's just recolored enemy units you have already met by that time. [h2]Progression[/h2] Now this is the main culprit why I left a negative review. Not overflowing, barely readable text prompts, nor the linear "main quest" or some debatable game-design decisions, but this. Everything mentioned above is layered upon innate and extreme lack of an interesting progression system. The game's progression system works like that: you fight enemies, you get experience, level up, have a leadership upgrade and choose one of two random attribute bonuses. Attribute system is mostly fine, you have four attributes: [b]Attack[/b], [b]Endurance[/b], [b]Spirit[/b] and [b]Knowledge[/b]. Endurance and Knowledge increase physical/magical damage resistance of your units (but nowhere does it say by how much) while Attack increases their output damage (once again, God knows by how much). The Spirit increase your maximum and starting Rage (game's Mana analogue, which it humbly appropriated from King's Bounty) and damage output from spells. The main problem is with Leadership, or, to be specific, the system around it. Just like in King's Bounty, the player's army size is limited by their Leadership. The thing is, any unit has a star rating (I'm gonna call it [i]level[/i] for simplicity) and it too defines what kind of units you can have in your army. You have up to 15 levels in your whole army in total, meaning you just can't have a half of possible unit combinations that are [b]already limitied by small unit roster, leadership and gold expenses[/b]. It deprives the game of any left non-linearity, basically shoehorning it into the very same playstyle, unit roster and upgrade choices every time, leaving zero room for non-torturous replayability. That, coupled with fact that game is itself very short, give a superficial, content-less impression. (I've been trying to have a no-loss run on Hard, replaying almost every single battle few times and it took me 60-70 mintues to get through the campaign). As if it wasn't bland enough, there's no high stakes or any challenge at all. If you lose your units they get resurrected for a very small amount of gold. Strangely enough, this allows you to softlock yourself by spending too much gold before fighting a strong enemy. After that you don't have the gold to buy new units and can't continue playing since your army's too weak to progress. Items also suck - the following item is almost either better than previous one or useless and there's only 3 or 4 different items for every slot, so once again, the same thing: lack of variability under the thin veil of pretend non-linearity. [h2]Few good things[/h2] If you have read up this review to this point you may think that this game is completely bad, which is not true. I really tried to like the game, and there are some redeeming qualities. First of all, graphics and stylization is pretty good, music is basic but it works properly - by creating a fitting low-fantasy vibe. Core gameplay of battle mode is also solid - there are classical wait/defense up options; there are some chests scattered around the battlefield that you can pick up for additional gold; attribute-upgrading altars are fun and physical/magical unit division does work properly. This game has potential, but the devs have chosen linear and safe approach that doesn't demand much resources and time. That's a shame cause there's huge market gap for the games of this sort.