Brave: A Warrior’s Tale Review




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Developer: Collision Studios Publisher: Evolved Games
Release Date: August 4, 2009 Available On: Wii and Xbox 360

I know a bad game when I see one or play one. It didn’t take very much playing to figure out that Brave: A Warrior’s Tale was one of these types of games. From the outdated last-generation graphics to the voice work that was seemingly hired off the street, Brave does not hold up well against other platformers on the Xbox 360 and Wii. Read on to find out what you are not missing by avoiding this game.

Brave is a sequel to the underwhelming 2007 platformer Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer for the PS2. As you can guess from the title, you play as Brave, a Native American boy whose story you will follow as he becomes a warrior. The sequel introduces a new character, Courage, who gets tasked with defending his village. Pretty basic storyline even by platforming standards.

Things go downhill from here. The combat is both tedious and monotonous. You run around the levels with a tomahawk, eventually getting a bow and arrow to go along with it. There really is no aiming system to speak of other than a lock-on ability that basically does the work for you. Brave is filled with rudimentary platforming elements and boring combat. There is very little variety to speak of except for lame flying missions and boat paddling.

One element that could have been interesting is that you can possess animals. This seems like a good idea given the theme of the game yet they managed to screw it up. One of them has you running around as a rabbit with the sole purpose of reaching glowing checkpoints before a bar runs out at the top of the screen. What is this a racing game? Another has you possess a bear, which you would think could be cool, except he can’t really die. Again, lame.




If you actually bother to pick up this game you will run into a ton of glitches throughout the world. I had a problem falling off of ledges without any reason other than being close to the edge. Another glitch occurred when I was fighting wolves in the forest. One of them glitched through a rock and into another part of the map, which meant that I had to backtrack to find him. Which reminds me, there is a lot of backtracking in this game.

The graphics look decent at times, but when the camera pans in the textures are both blocky and blurry. Some parts of this game look competently next-gen while others remind me of Nintendo 64 graphics. The camera can be an issue as it gets jerky. Don’t be surprised if you die on account of the camera at times.

There is no ambient sound whatsoever. You get basic sound effects from attacking enemies and such, but the complete lack of music throughout much of the game makes the experience that much more tiring. Audio issues arise quite a bit with choppy noises cropping up a lot and overall low sound quality. The voice acting is equally bad. They sound nothing like Native Americans, either. Brave sounds more like a whiny suburban white kid.

I am honestly hard pressed to find something that I liked about this game. The gameplay is bad, the graphics remind me of platformers from ten years ago, the sound quality is off and the camera is jerky. The concept at least was decent enough. The execution is where things went wrong. This $40 “budget” title would have been $20 just a few years ago and even that would be asking too much.

Graphics: 4
Sound: 2
Gameplay: 3
Creativity: 2
Replay Value/Game Length: 2
Final: 3 out of 10
Written by Kyle Bell Write a User Review

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