Battle Realms

If this is any indication of what we’ll see from Liquid in the future, then strategy gamers are in for a real treat. Titles like Kohan proved to us that games don’t have to keep throwing laundry lists of features at us to remain innovative. Battle Realm takes the same approach of narrowing the focus of most RTS games to
provide a really meaningful and rewarding experience. Battle Realms
places you in the role of a commander in an Asian-themed, fantasy
setting. You’ll command small armies of ronin, samurai, warlocks and
werewolves. It’s more of a tactical game in spirit than a strategy game,
but by taking the focus down to a much more personal level, Battle
Realms succeeds in drawing you deep into the action.

Battle Realms gets by with only two resources — rice and water. Instead
of buying units outright you’ll need to train your peasants as warriors
in order to create your armies. This is a really refreshing approach
but has a few shortcomings. The more units you have on the map, the
slower new peasants are created. This means that building up your army
towards the end of the missions is a lot more time-consuming than it
needs to be. Apart from being strange from a gameplay standpoint, it
also seems like bad biology — I would think that, up to a certain
point, more units on the map would mean a quicker birth rate for your
peasants.

Inexhaustible resources and a severe fog of war also lead to one of my
biggest frustrations with the game. As long as a single enemy peasant is
able to escape destruction, your opponent can quickly set up a new camp
somewhere and be up and running again before you’re likely to find him.
This isn’t a problem when you’re only facing one enemy but when you’ve
got to go head to head with the Lotus and Wolf clans at once, you can
find yourself destroying the same base over and over again.

Tons of personality in the animations and voices bring the units to
life. Every warrior has a handful of combat animations that are truly
thrilling to watch (your own hero unit will occasionally draw his sword
and practice some moves when at rest). Samurai kneel and pray, wounded
units stagger and limp around and peasants get thrown to the ground when
taming horses. Perhaps the most thrilling animation is when you select a
group of your units and watch them all draw their weapons in
anticipation of carrying out whatever ass-kicking you’ve got in mind.

In Battle Realms all units start as peasants but they can train at various buildings to become other
units like spearmen and archers. You can then take those units and send
them to be trained at other structures to produce even more powerful
units. Spearmen can be sent to the archery range to become dragon
warriors. Archers can be sent to the alchemist hut to become chemists
(apparently a Japanese word for “guy who shoots fireworks at you”). You
can then even take these units and train them at other buildings as well
to produce yet even more powerful units.

While it’s an awesome concept, there are a few shortcomings. One,
there’s no clear indication as to which units are suited to a particular
task. The manual sort of hints at some general strategies but it’s
still not clear why you’d pick a lower level unit when it’s just as
convenient to upgrade all the way to the top. And as the birth rate of
your peasants slows as you reach the higher levels, there’s always time
and resources enough to make an army of the biggest, baddest unit
available. If you’ve managed your economy just right, you can make do
with only one person collecting each resource. But if you do run out of a
resource you can’t untrain or retrain units so you’ll have to kill some
units before you can produce more.

Ultimately, dragon warriors are way better than a mixed group of archers
and spearmen, and samurai are better than a mixed group of dragon
warriors and powder keg cannoneers. Heck, the samurai are so tough that
they’ll prostrate themselves right in the middle of a river and start
praying while underwater. If that wasn’t enough to convince you to leave
them alone, the fact that they kill themselves before the enemy gets a
chance to should convince you not to mess around with them.

Given the tactical nature of the game, it’s a shame that there aren’t any formation controls. You can
set sort of general rules of engagement (strangely not all the time)
but for the most part your units will run in a big clump to attack
whatever big clump the enemy has around. It’s best not to mess with them
when they’re like this, but just pray that your units will come out on
top once the skirmish is over. And while the units themselves seem to
have a good time finding targets of their own to attack, the healer
units show almost no initiative on their own, meaning you have to heal
damaged units during a fight by yourself.

A lot of personality has been incorporated into the environments of
Battle Realms. The game takes place in a beautiful and detailed world.
Realistic ripples appear when your units cross rivers, shadows of rain
clouds drift across the ground and birds dot the landscape. But far from
just being aesthetic effects, these details are integrated into the
game. Rain affects combat and can turn the tide of battle by
extinguishing the fires you’ve set in the opposing villages. Birds
scatter and fly whenever enemy units are near, giving you an early
warning of their approach. Blood pools on the grounds and in ponds as
units are killed.

The graphics are tight overall and the game has a fantastic art style.
Everything’s suitably cinematic, from the fighting animations to the
spell effects. Although the camera can’t be moved around, you’re
supposed to be able to zoom in a bit and view the action from a lower
angle. Sadly, use of this feature is locked to the mouse wheel and
didn’t work at all . But hey, at least I have a mouse wheel in the first place.

The cutscenes let you get close to the action between the missions.
While the graphics aren’t spectacular at this level, it really preserves
the feel of the game to see the same units in the cutscenes as you see
on the mission maps. Good voice acting and a stirring story only add to
the illusion. The story itself involves your efforts to subdue the rival
Wolf and Lotus clans through recovery of a hidden artifact. And even
though the game is relatively linear, there’s a really good sense of
choice built into it all. At the beginning of the game you’re presented
with a moral choice that leads down one of two campaign paths
(strangely, the “good” path still results in lots of missions where
you’re supposed to kill everything that moves).

Just as an aside, I take notes while I play these games and then I use
those notes to write up the review. Usually I can fit them in to a
coherent sort of outline but there’s this one entry in my notes that I
don’t know where to put, so it’s going here. I have written, “that
warlock lightning [expletive].” Let me just say that “that warlock
lightning [expletive]” is perhaps a bit unbalanced. The part where I
talked about the blood in the water? That was the next entry under “that
warlock lightning [expletive].” It’s kind of a cop-out in terms of
organization, but I thought you’d like to know.

Multiplayer is handled well on ubi.com.
Playing the Serpent or Dragon clans are pretty straightforward but the
other two require some finesse (or some luck) to be played successfully.
Since it’s the only chance you’ll get to play the Lotus or Wolf clans,
you’d really be missing out if you didn’t try out these features.
(Thankfully, you can set up single-player skirmishes as well.)

In short, Battle Realms is a remarkably well-produced and intimate game
that is the perfect answer for all of those “more is more” strategy
games. By focusing on small unit action and narrowing the field to a
handful of units, Battle Realms reminds me a lot of the time I spent
with Warcraft 2. The hardware requirements are a bit steep, but if you do have the rig to run it (at least a P500 with a minimum of 64MB of RAM and a decent video card), it’s definitely rewarding.