Braveheart

Braveheart should've been great. It has 3D battle sequences, a complex strategical foundation, and could pass for a top-notch historical sim. Conceptually, it is a knock-out. But good ideas and name recognition can't make up for a game that is hard to learn, tedious to play, and full of bugs.

Braveheart should've been great. It has 3D battle sequences, a complex strategical foundation, and could pass for a top-notch historical sim. Conceptually, it is a knock-out.

But good ideas and name recognition can't make up for a game that is hard to learn, tedious to play, and full of bugs. Realism is one thing, but after playing Braveheart, I felt as if I had actually gone though a war myself.

Braveheart is an ambitious undertaking for Red Lemon Studios. The game attempts to combine large-scale military strategy in a detailed 2D world with the excitement of 3D tactical battles. Your goal is to unite the warring Scottish clans through either diplomacy or battle before the English secure complete domination. It is a vast and open-ended game that could be endless fun if only the gameplay were not so tedious.

The unintuitive interface is responsible for most of my frustration. Every screen is full of small, almost indistinguishable icons whose function must be committed to memory before the game begins to flow. Town management--the game's backbone-consists of hours of tedious pointing and clicking.

Do you want to get right in and start killing people? You'll have to wade through three screens, point and click nearly twenty times, and wait for weeks in game-time for your troops reach their destination. The town management is conceptually complex and should be a delight to sim fans who enjoy minute detail, but impatient types will be running for the hills after only a short while.

I'm one of those impatient types and was banking on the 3D battles to grab my interest. I'd happily micromanage bloody battles and raids.

But Braveheart failed in this aspect, too. Sneaking up on the enemy with your carefully-positioned troops will only last as long as you are out of sight. The minute that the troops recognize each other, they converge into one massive swarm. So much for tactics!

The polygonal graphics are at first impressive, but I had trouble viewing them due to more interface problems. The battlecam gives you three vantage points: a first-person perspective, a "following view" which puts you directly behind a soldier and an overhead perspective. In first-person, figures and parts of figures tend to disappear. It is difficult to control the battlecam, and it has a tendency to switch perspectives without warning. If the warrior who had been tagged with the battlecam dies, your perspective will spin out of control until you right click on another man. This makes viewing the battle far more difficult than it should be.

Moreover, Braveheart is riddled with bugs and design flaws. For instance, the time advancement system has a mind of its own, the cursor will suddenly become stuck on the side of the screen, and it crashed on both my systems (a PII 350 and a PIII 450 - both with the proper 3D accelerators). I also spent a great deal of time trying to understand why my troops would be inexplicably lost in battle. (A patch fixes some, but not all, of the bugs.)

You'd be better off buying a game that's less work, more fun?and not half-baked.

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