Publisher: Crave Entertainment, www.cravegames.com
Ages: Eight and up.
Parental Advisory: This game is based on war.
Violence
Rating: 
Can a real-time strategy game make Jackie Chan proud? In this regard, Crave
Entertainment's Battle Realms offers a solid and rather innovative real-time
strategy game that serves entertaining martial arts battles. Until now, most
real-time strategy games represented battles and fighting with lots of random
hacking and slashing.
Going beyond these games, Battle Realms depicts its battle with figures that look as if they are actually fighting. While you won't mistake the action for something out of a martial arts movie, you can actually see the figures hitting each other.
As in any solid real-time strategy (RTS) game, Battle Realms gives you good control over your units to move to different locations, attack, and apply special abilities. The game's path finding is decent, and you'll find that units do a good job of thinking for themselves to automatically attack or defend when they're near the enemy.
Compared against other real-time strategy games, Battle Realms is rather weak on formations. With stronger formations, the game could make it easier to control large numbers of units in battle. Interestingly, in Battle Realms, you don't purchase and generate battle units, but train peasants into them. This significant twist means that you have to balance the number of peasants that you assign to gather resources against those that you train to serve in armies. It's a compelling new approach that works well and makes you approach your resources and armies in a different way.
The game offers a varied mix of compelling warriors that include swordsmen, bandits, sharpshooters, ronins, necromancers, and more-each with their own personalities. In Battle Realms, I liked the way that the units could be good at both long-distance and close-up fighting. In this game, the nuances and relative strengths of the units take a long time to learn. You can build structures that give troops special equipment, which adds another strategic element to the game. Another consideration, the game rewards you for sending troops out and attacking, and not squatting down to build and defend an impenetrable fort.
The game's campaign missions are well done and the AI puts up a good fight and even applies solid strategy to beat you. You can also compete against up to seven human players, which is a blast, on a generous number of maps. The game's graphics, particularly the lush and semi-realistic terrain, are detailed and excellent. The 3D warriors, while faceless, are well modeled and move well. I was also impressed with the sound effects that evoke the game's exotic setting.
While there are a glut of good real-time strategy games on the market, Battle Realms stands out as an entertaining experience that's worth considering.
