Brave is only for the innocent and uninitiated, and even so, only manages to offer up a few interesting morsels. It strikes the pleasure centers of the brain that flash and buzz during the course of a normal gaming experience like a bike ride down a hot windy street on trash day. Sometimes you're in the clear and coast forward and all seems well, but then you pass into a foul patch and regret turning down the road in the first place.
It's a tale told mostly in flashback, as a group of Native American children listen to a village elder prattle on about adventures past against a dastardly Wendigo spirit. During the course of the adventure you'll upgrade your abilities, at first using sticks on fire to light things and read cave paintings, then later on gaining magical powers, throwing axes, and bows and arrows to battle against wolves, spirits, and rock golems.
Since this isn't a game meant to confuse the player, all stages are built to be simple to move through. Minimap highlights and a strangely non-specific hint system are there to prod you forward, but given the limited space of each stage it's near impossible to reach the point where you're not sure where to go.
What will be more of a problem is actually performing some of the actions. He's got a very limited combo system at his disposal and a power-up special ability, making all fighting of the melee variety an easy thing. Just keep hitting that attack button and you'll win eventually. With infinite lives and an auto-save system that frequently kicks in, the game never requires you replay too large a section, and you'll never have to start over entirely.
All that seems to work well considering the target audience, but then the game kicks you in the side of the head when it comes to actually moving around.
Platforming and climbing is too imprecise to be any fun here. It's too much of a chore to manage Brave's footing and relative jump distances, particularly when trying to bound across some of the fast-moving platform sections near the end of the game. That doesn't mean I'm complaining that it's too hard — it's not — and it shouldn't be too difficult for a young audience. It's just that through no fault of your own you'll find Brave goes tumbling from floating platforms because he mysteriously wouldn't stop rolling forward or the camera got stuck in a rock or wouldn't adjust to the correct angle or wasn't actually showing the next platform in the jumping sequence.
In this sense it feels like an unfinished product, particularly with the problematic camera controls on the Wii, where not enough care was given to the presentation to ensure the player can jump through the game's hoops without inadvertently flying off into a lava lake when the goal was to simply jump across a short gap.
The in-game audio, music, voice and sound effects also tell the tale of a low-budget or dated production. Again, Brave may have been an at least good and perhaps exceptional endeavor 10 or more years ago, but in presentation, it just cannot, in any facet, measure up to even mediocre contemporary expectations. It is a discount title, but it's a Wii game, not a downloadable N64 title. A fair number of N64 titles looked and sounded better, and they were crisper than Brave can consistently manage.
If you, or particularly your children, can stoically look past the eye and ear candy, peering into the heart of a game, there is some fun adventuring to be had. Brave 's levels are well designed enough that they lack most of the frustrating "magic moment" platform jumps and the like that spoil even much finer games in the genre. The spare environment detail will make you feel all alone, but then again, Brave is mostly all alone on his quest, save for chance meetings with wise elders, spirits and, of course, various friend and foe creatures of the forests.
Should you decide to look past the production values and take SouthPeak up on its offer of mildly engaging gameplay at discount pricing, there are a couple of issues with the control mechanic.
While the camera, bane of 3-D platformers, is not bad at all, there are moments during which you'll be staring in exactly the opposite direction of where you need to look.
Fortunately, the developers built in a camera-centering feature, which is by default assigned to a Nunchuk button. Every time I wound up studying textures up close when I need to be sizing up a leap of faith, the centering feature bailed me out. Also on the positive side, after Brave acquires his tracking skills, there's a very limited but useful difficulty adjustment mechanism in the game.
If you head around in circles, passing the same points of interests a second time without arriving at the proper destination, the optional mini-map, unobtrusively bound by a circle in the lower right corner of your screen, displays a blue dot indicating where, more or less, you should hunt around for required elements.
But the zoom-look system is a mess. The tracking is too fast and inaccurate, so it's an absolute pain, and there's no way to adjust the Wiimote's tracking speed in the game preferences.
That's a real problem. As well, the game's camera is terrible and will be a constant pest and annoyance throughout the entire game. There is a famous saying that says "There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity.
At times it can be a real treat , especially with its mini-games that gives you some time to relax between hard levels. But other times, it is down right dumb as the later levels get boring and the camera movements get more annoying. Rating: 3. Cute story Rating: 5. Rating: 4. Brave: A Warrior's Tale could have been a great game, too bad the game was made in less then 1 week Use your keyboard!
0コメント