Braveland Wizard is a tactical strategy game fashioned directly after the classic Kings Bounty games. Basically you travel around a map with followers that you control in combat. It’s a painfully short game overall, but if you are looking for a quick game with appealing graphics and engaging tactical combat a la King’s Bounty, then you’re in the right place.
The sequel to Braveland, Braveland Wizard follows the first female graduate from a wizard academy as she embarks on a quest to complete her final examination and become an officially certified wizard. It is about as simple as that. There are no complicated romantic relationships, no real emotional intrigue. Along the way, she meets with groups of people that fall under her command and travel with her to help her defeat enemies. Just a straight forward plotline, you are this girl, you have this objective, you meet these people that you can hire as accomplices, you complete your objectives, end of story. It’s actually refreshing in its simplistic nature, rather than gumming up your experience with an overly contrived plot.
Combat is also very simple but very engaging. As with its legendary progenitor, the field is comprised of a hexagonal honeycomb grid, and each type of follower you have, no matter how many individuals, shows up as one group taking up one space. You can direct them to move a certain number of spaces, and attack an enemy that falls in range. The more individuals in a group, the more powerful the group is, and the more times the group can be hit before disappearing. Each group also has a special ability which you can use once every few rounds. For example, the Archers have an ice arrow attack that deals extra damage and recharges once every 5 turns, while Elementalists have a rooting attack that damages one enemy and holds it in place for a few turns. As the wizard you can learn spells that you can cast once every few rounds as a free action to help your troops.
The number of followers of each type that you can take with you is determined by your leadership score, which increases when you level up and can also be increased via certain types of gear. Each type of follower also has a certain value, and the value of your entire group can only equal a certain number, also dependent on your leadership score. It might sound a little confusing, but it’s actually really easy when you are looking at it.
The map is rather small and thus easy to navigate. It’s also linear, so you start off at point A, and you follow a path to point B. The only deviation from this is if there is a split path, but the second option is usually a shop or a place to hire more followers. An irritating little quirk about this system is that your character has to walk between these locations. She doesn’t warp to ones she has already been to, and she never changes pace, so if you need to go all the way back to the beginning of the map (and sometimes you do in order to hire certain types of followers) you can be sitting there for a while as she slowly makes her way across the entire map.
The only two real complaints that I have concern the balance between normal enemies and bosses, and the overall length of the game. I played normal mode, and everything was fine up until a boss. Mobs were skilled enough to give me a challenge at normal play speed, but weren’t so easy I could just breeze through them either; it ended up being a very balanced, evenly paced experience. I tried multiple times to beat the first boss when I got to it, but nothing doing. Eventually I had to backtrack to a cave and farm some very low level kills to collect enough money to hire more followers and level up so that I could move on. Unfortunately, from that point on combat was far easier, most of the challenge was gone, and I waltzed right on through until the next boss. And the same thing happened again; it was like I hit a wall. It got to this strange place where everything was really easy until the bosses which were sort of challenging instead of the nice pace that I had gotten used to in the first part of the game. Add that on top of the fact that if I had sat down and done nothing but played this game I would have finished it in an evening (my total play time was apparently just short of 8 hours with all of the aforementioned farming included), and it begins to feel like the difficulty spike posed by the games bosses was padding built to make this very short game seem longer.
The difference in difficulty between normal mobs and bosses makes Braveland Wizard almost impossible to get through without a fair amount of tedious level grinding. The graphics are crisp, the story is easy to follow and interesting and the gameplay overall is compelling, but for a game you pay to play, it feels too short from start to finish. However, it is a very engaging little game. If you are looking for epic strategy, look elsewhere, but if all you want is a short and quick tactical strategy fix, Braveland Wizard will likely do the trick.
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Is it Hardcore?
Yes.
Though the pacing is sometimes clumsy and at times it feels a little stretched, Braveland Wizard is a solid tactical game with winning cartoon style graphics and an interesting plotline.
