August Reviews: Strategy Games
	Battle Realms Overall Rating: 9 Gameplay: 9 Tilt: 9 Sound: 9 Graphics: 9 Value: 9

Review:  The overall atmosphere of the game is nicely done. The mythical Japanese setting with Kung Fu movie tie ins allows for some cool looking units and a compelling universe. There are four distinct clans and each has their own personality. The most traditional and well rounded is the Dragon Clan with their honorable spearmen and giant sword wielding Dragon Warriors. Next is the Serpent Clan who seems like a politically corrupt Dragon Clan. They rely slightly less strength or more trickery than the Dragons as their troops are not a skilled in general. Even more corrupt is the Lotus Clan. They rely on death magic and their less than healthy troops to spread the sicknesses they are already plagued with. Finally is the Wolf Clan. The Wolves are very close to nature and, more specifically, the wolf, as their name implies. Most of their units rely on natural strength and speed. One of their coolest units is the Sledger who carries around a hammer as big as his already huge body.

The first thing anyone should notice is that Battle Realms just looks like it belongs to a new generation of strategy games. The graphics are flat out beautiful. Battle Realm’s world is one of the few large scale games to actually make it seem like the world around you is alive. The terrain is nicely rendered and buildings have plenty of flare. While it seems that most of the battles are fought on grass lands dotted with lakes and forest, the colors are bright and the textures are nice enough that the world never gets boring or dull. What really makes the world interesting, though, is the small details such as birds flying about, butterflies bobbing around your units, and squirrels scampering about. The details are not just for show either. When a group of soldiers run into a forest birds will sometimes be started and will flock away while making enough noise to get your attention and this will often spoil a surprise attack coming from the forest.

Units look good and are very well animated. Gone are the days of two swordsmen stand next to each other and take turns hitting the other on the head. Battle Realm’s units will drive, swing, plunge, and jump at their enemies with some very cool animations. During fights the units don’t stand still either as they back away, dodge, charge, and sidestep around the map. All this make for some exciting battles, even when it’s a pare of scouts meeting up in the middle of the field. When multiple units meet up, be prepared for some of the coolest battles to ever grace RTSes. Battles become a big ball of mayhem as units duke it out a move around in some sort of bloody ballet. This looks especially great when units are fighting in a small pond with water splashing about. Sometimes battles remind me of great fighting sequences from movies like Excalibur and even Braveheart, except the Japanese theme provides the added fun of flips and kicks to swordplay.

As mentioned earlier, one of the best things is the small details that made it into the game. After a few slashes with a sword, character models will carry around blood stained weapons for the remainder of the mission. When units are wounded in battle they’ll limp away. As characters enter ponds nice looking ripples will appear around them. When some units are left standing on their own they’ll do some interesting things like sharpen their weapons. You can even see slight shadows on the ground from clouds moving overhead. All these details only make the world even more interesting and always give you something to look at other than static ground.

Battle Realms sounds pretty good as well. During battles amid the clangs or swords and armor you can sometimes hear taunts and cries for help. In peaceful times the sounds of peasants harvesting rice and filling buckets of water at the local water source are subtle enough not to detract you from managing your villages. The in game music is somewhat dynamic as it switches from peaceful Japanese flutes to the drums and horns whenever you enter battle.

Battles can get very overwhelming in much in the same way battle became overwhelming in Sacrifice. Because the units move around so much it is often hard to pinpoint a single unit in combat. Fortunately, micromanagement, while important, isn’t as needed as it was in Sacrifice because of the great AI. Your soldiers can pick their own targets intelligently and waste little time in between killing on enemy and moving onto the next. One important thing in battle is that missile units like Archers cannot fire when attacked by a melee fighter. This means if you occupy archers during a battle you only have to worry about the melee fighters they are backing up. Sometimes, it seems that units are smart enough to give up their current target and move onto something more important. In a few instances, it seems some soldiers will leave the fray to distract archers raining he|| onto your soldiers. The downside to this AI is that it seems to make units a little too trigger happy. Pulling away from battle is hard because sometimes you will order units away only to see them running back towards the enemy again. While its annoying at times, it is something that can be overcome with a watchful eye. Another small fix is to play with the unit stances which range from stand ground to guard, but it is still hard to stop units from running back into a losing battle.

Most of the strategic elements in the game come from army customization. Every single unit seems to have multiple purposes. For example, while Archers can shoot arrows, they can also be used in melee combat if you feel it is needed (perhaps to distract another group of archers while melee units move into a town for a big push). Of course, you can always part a group of archers on a hill above an enemy town and watch as they tear everything up. Wild horses can be domesticated and all units can use them, including peasants. While most units can ride them to receive a health, speed, and damage bonuses, peasants can use them the haul more things back from resource gathering. All units also have a stamina bar which is used for a variety of things, the simplest of which is to have your units run.

Perhaps the most interesting customization element comes in the form unit inventory, or Battle Gear as it is referred to in the game. Individual units can learn individual skills by entering particular buildings and using up some resources. Each of these skills is different and requires certain things to activate such as stamina, heath, or even a unit’s life. Nothing on screen distinguishes the unit from any other of it’s kind, but you can see if they have the ability when you select them and in information screen as the new abilities will show up as an activation button. A classic example of this is a flame arrow for archers which does little damage to enemies, but is very effective against buildings. While this is hard to keep tract of when you have a large army, it do give you something to throw enemies off with as you pull out hidden abilities in the midst of battle. If you have multiple units selected, each unit has a portrait in your info screen with the gear activation button under it using the appropriate icon for the gear they posses. This way can still activate a particular ability by selecting all your units and clicking the ability you want even in the most chaotic battles.

The final customization feature is more traditional. These are overall upgrades for a particular type of unit. What makes these interesting is how they are brought about in game. During battle you will earn Yin and Yang points. These points are essentially experience gain in battle, but for the army as a whole. Training buildings will allow you to spend these points on particular upgrades, like damage upgrades much in the same way upgrades worked in games like Starcraft. When you are upgrading that building can’t be used to train troops and afterwards all current and future soldiers will be upgraded. Getting these points is sometimes difficult though, so don’t expect to simply be able to upgrade everything, at least immediately.

With all this to keep track of during battles that are hard to control, the interface actually goes a long way in making your job a bit easier. Like Age of Empires, there is an idle peasant button so you can keep all your workers busy. Added to this button is a find battle button that shows up whenever your units are engaged with the enemy and a find burning building button which shows up if one of your buildings has caught fire which will eventually destroy it. In that case, you’ll have to douse the fire by ordering peasants to get water and dump it on the fire. As mentioned earlier, all the units special abilities have an activation button below their portrait when you have multiple units selected, so you can make up mixed groups and not have to worry about micromanagement as much when you need to work fast. Where the interface fails is the mini-map. It is small and a little too simple. All your units and buildings are in the same color, so finding idle soldiers is sometimes difficult because you can’t immediately tell where they are if they are in your town. Instead you’ll see a large block of color made up by your buildings and units. Again, a watchful eye can solve this, but it is something that would make things simpler when you need to move fast.

By far, the most interesting feature in Battle Realms is the building and economic system and I think this is what future games will have to think about when unit creation is concerned. In Battle Realms there are two basic resources: rice and water. Water is simple. It comes from lakes and ponds and you tell peasants to bring it back to town in buckets like you would tell orcs to bring gold in Warcraft. Rice is more interesting. It grows in fields and you have peasants harvest it. The problem is, a field can be fairly quickly harvested, so you have to order more peasants (or the ones who now have nothing to do because the rice is all gone) to bring water to the field and water the rice. After a bit of time, rice will again be ready to harvest. There are some more strategic elements to this as a Lotus unit called the Infested One can poison rice fields and preventing further growth for some time. It seems that both rice and water are unlimited, so the limiting factor is you village can only support so many people total, which includes soldiers and peasants.

The building system in Battle Realms is very interesting and, quite honestly, the most innovative thing in any RTS in Homeworld’s effective use of a 3D camera. No longer do you simply throw money into a building to see it spit out a soldier a little later. Now you have to train units in certain fields of combat. Here’s how it works on the most basic level. You build a peasant hut where a peasant is born every so often. Then you can then put that peasant to work gathering resources, or have him build something. When you get around to building a training building, such as a dojo or archery range, you can then sent peasants in, one at a time, to be training in fighting or archery. When the peasant is trained you now have a soldier ready for battle. This gets even more interesting in that you can send a soldier to train in another type of training building to produce hybrid soldiers which are more powerful. Later down the line, to make the most advanced units you have had to send soldiers into many different builds which not only makes it harder to make advanced units, but also makes them more valuable. To make things more simple you can set rally points like most current RTSes, but you can have soldiers rally into another training building to essentially make a production line for troops. You can even start the rally point from the peasant hut to a training building so right when a peasant is born you can start cracking the whip. While it make seem a bit more difficult at first, it is a very innovative, yet realistic, approach to building armies and something that should have been considered much earlier in the RTS genre. Think about the possibilities in future games where a race might have an advantage because it doesn’t have to train units, but can just manufacture them like old building models. This would be perfect in a organic versus a robotic war game. When something like that happens, we’ll have Battle Realms to thank for that.

The single player game also has some notable features. It seems at the beginning of the game you can pick to be a good or a bad guy as the main character, Kenji, wonders upon a town under attack by some bandits. You can pick to help the bandits or the villagers there by picking to be a good or bad guy and picking what armies you will control. The good side will control the Dragon Clan’s army while the bad will use the Serpent Clan’s. On top of that, the story line is branching as you can pick where to send your troops and where to attack. This all should leave for more than usual replay value on the single player side. The biggest problem with this is there is no story campaign for the Lotus or Wolf Clans, but this is a more story oriented which is always refreshing.

All in all, Battle Realms has given the RTS genre a much needed really hard kick in the pants, even more so than the amazing Conquest earlier this year. Because all of this, this game has easily become my choice for Game of the Year and, unless something comes out of now where, I’m sticking with it. Battle Realms has style, class, is more far innovative than anything else I’ve seen this year, and is really fun to play if you like RTS and I feel that this will become the standard for the “traditional” ground based RTS should more people give this game the attention is deserves. I suppose you can call it the Warcraft II of our times. The amazing thing is next year when WCIII is finally released it’ll have to live up to Battle Realms for me to be interested (of course, I know I’m the exception there). Of course, what else would you expect when this game was produced by the producer of the original Command and Conquer was involved?

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