Bravada Review

Alright, so there is one mechanic at work worth discussing, which is the means by which you build your party. All units experience perma-death – except you, obviously – and your oven-mitt grip on the combat means that a high turnover rate is pretty much inevitable. Rather than populate your party with other dwarves, your primary solution is to clone friendly versions of enemy units. It's a nice idea, but without a core group of fleshed-out party members the only personality in the game – bearing in mind that I'm using the term 'personality' at its absolute most liberal – comes from the protagonist and his bat companion. There's potential here for a really great system where you obsess over the exact composition of your party by painstakingly cloning and levelling the exact units you want, but with spells and special abilities lying somewhere at the bottom of the pile of elements Bravada carelessly discarded, it's badly stymied by the severe lack of variety on display. Oh, some units have more health, some have a minor critical chance and some hit in an area of effect, but by and large you'll just grab whatever happens to be closest to hand because anything else is just too much fuss.

Then there are the RPG elements themselves, which go beyond bare-bones and into the realm of suspiciously shaped rocks which could potentially look like bones if you squinted at them hard enough. Levelling up automatically grants you a little bit of every stat, along with refilling your health, and every few level-ups you get to pick an extra boost to one of three stats: health, attack power, or armour. That's literally the extent of the build customisation made available to you in Bravada. You can upgrade your units every few levels too, at which point you can upgrade a unit of any class into a unit of any other class, so there isn't even any specialisation at work here: a tier-1 Shaman can upgrade into a tier-2 Meat Head, no worries. The whole system is just so lax, devoid of complexity. I don't like to use the term 'casual' so derisively, but that's exactly what it is: casual. A game bled so relentlessly down to the bare minimums that virtually all it demands of the player is that they keep moving forward.

Wait just a segue-supporting second, I think I might just be onto something here. Vastly oversimplified gameplay? Generic cartoon-y polygonal visuals? Gumless attempts at wackiness that crumble hopelessly? Utterly characterless characters? Mouse-driven controls with great big icons along the side of the screen? Are we absolutely sure that Bravada wasn't intended to be a mobile game at some point? I mean, I don't want to burden any game with such a dreadfully disreputable label, but you know that's what it looks like, right?

Unfortunately I doubt that that's really the case. Everything Bravada does feels weirdly intentional, and it makes the game frustrating to deal with from a reviewer's perspective. If there was some underlying sense that this was an all an accident, the tragic outcome of a philosophy of streamlining gameplay gone horribly wrong, then I could see it as a well-intentioned game that fell afoul of inexperience, but reality seeks to get in the way of this romantic image. Just about everything that's actually there is polished and reasonably well-made, and the impression is less of a good game gone bad and more of a game that was simply designed from the ground up like this. Features that could have given the game some draw as a tactical RPG – engaging storytelling, tense encounters, in-depth management – have been unceremoniously torn out to pave the way for this wretched hybrid combat system, which in no way makes up for that kind of loss. It's the same kind of effect you'd get from removing all the furniture in your house in order to allow a cow to live there: deep discomfort and a lingering sense of emptiness, all for the sake of something that smells awful, makes stupid bleating noises, and leaves manure all over the place.

Taken as a set of component parts, there's nothing particularly wrong with Bravada. At no point did I think “wow, that targeting indicator is really dodgy” or “I'm going to swallow a heavy-duty stapler if I have to go through this dialogue tree one more time”, but that's because there were no dialogue trees, and even if there were the game would have probably just handled them for me somehow. Bravada's downfall lies not so much in individual faults as in its crushing, soulless sense of utter emptiness. Is this coming across yet? No story, no characters, no comedy – unless you enjoy reading the jokes on the backs of cereal boxes – no depth or complexity or even sufficient challenge; just a really long grid that you walk down while your character hits things with a stick. With other RPGs, that would be a flippant, off-handed summary; with Bravada, it's the most accurate description you'll hear all day.