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Battle Realms.....simply the best RTS created.PERIOD

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

First of all the first thing that will catch your eye is Battle Realms detailed and lush graphics. From the units to the rivers,trees and animals that populate the world the graphics shine wonderfully. Not to mention that the animation of the units is exqusite,smooth and silky. No matter if they are fighting or just standing still surveying the area,it shows baby company liquid knows how to make a game beautiful. Still as we all know graphics do not make a game only compliments it, and the gameplay in Battle Realms is second to none. Massing units of the same type in this game is suicidal seeing as every specific unit has a unit that can either counter him or die easily at his hand for e.g Samurais are weak to magic so they should avoid magic,while dragon warriors are strong to magic but weak vs cutting,so unit variety is the key. You must have quick hands and an intelligent mind to choose whom your units should attack, and whom to avoid. Added strategy comes from knowing 2nd tier and some 3rd tier units have both meele and ranged attacks, so choosing attacks is also wise. Units are upgraded with gifts such as strength,health,range etc. which is gained through ying or yang, so turtling all the time can be costly seeing as ying/yang is gained through hard fought battles. Battle Gears are also another strategic element to the game. For e.g archers can have two BGs such as a sight enhancer to scout the area or fire-arrows to burn buildings or to use against fire weak enemies, so choosing your battlegears is also the key to victory, you should also take note no unit in their clan has the same battlegear and they have 2 to choose from. Battle Gears are your friends they can either be defensive or offensive so choose wisely. Resources in this game are simple,yet sensible. Water and Rice is collected by your peasants,still peasants are used to build and or become units,so micro is in order to select your resource gatherers,builders and whom you wish to train into your fighting force.Its a delicate system that no idiot can use, too many peasants getting resources mean less fighters,still too many peasants training mean no gatherers, the system when used correctly can function smoothly and help towards victory. Units are trained equally innovatively, for e.g an archer can be trained in the alchemist hut to become sumo-cannoneers and so forth. So remembering which cross trained unit becomes what is helpful and forces you to upgrade your units just incase they right time is called for. Horses are also used in the game,which add as your transports, the horse can either help workers collect more rice/water or can be ridden by your units for extra health and the horse trample BG helps in the attack,so horses are also a strategic element if the oppurtunity arises. Of course this game also features heroes for each clan and all of them can be summoned at once, heroes help greatly in battle as they can reduce damage,drain stamina,summoning horses,calling forth lighting,teleportation,speed boosts or increase ally soldiers strength. This game is the closet to perfect you will ever see in any RTS game. It accomdates both rush and turtle style playing,forests can be used and walked through to hide in as well as alert you of enemies presence from the birds scattering,and the music in the game is equally brilliant. Units have innate abilities (which can be learned on the website) which help in battle, and each unit has a specific counter. With four completely different clans there is a variety of strategy in here. I cannot explain everything in the game, it must be experienced first, do yourself a favour and get this awesome game, where strategy truly counts instead of massing units.

A refreshing leap in the strategy genre.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I had looked at purchasing this game around the holiday season, but passed it up for more popular games such as Ghost Recon and Return to Castlewolfenstein. But recently, I found Battle Realms again. ... So I picked it up thinking "Hey if it ... big deal, ..." When I arrived at home and installed it with ease I was amazed with the great graphics and animations. Many will tell you it has these, but the campaign is wonderful also. It start's off with an RPG like premise where you choose evil or good by defending or slaying the villagers. From there you choose which provinces you wish to explore/attack and that determines what armies spot you or attack your lands. The four factions are great, I prefer the Dragon clan for the oriental setting, and the powerful Samurai unit. Each clan has dozens of unique touches that make them special. The Wolf clan are the barbarians that feed horses to their wolves rather than ride them, and their units are berserks with awe-inspiring combat prowess. Contrary to most speculation, the resource system is 'annoying' but that is untrue. You send villagers to get water or farm rice simple as that. When you have more than you need in resources, ..., just send the villagers to train and set off for war!
Battle Realms is a breath of fresh air in the 2-d world of strategy games, and I would have GLADLY payed ... if I had known how good it is. Its action is intense, and its graphics are wondeful. I can not wait until the next time I can lead my samurai's bows and blades into battle.
Keep Gaming!
...

great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Battle Realms is the BEST RTS sence star craft. iv played alot of them and they all are crude compaird to this game. I just wish more ppl played this game so there where more ppl on-line. if they had the comunity and the other fetures that blizzard has, it would be the best game there is. but well have to wait for liquid to get as popular as blizzard then great things will happen. some one needs to replace blizzard because they are lacking in qulity. Liquid is one of the best up and coming compainies i can think of. and i cant wait to see what they have coming up for us.

Online Multiplayer is atrocious!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Summary: Battle Realms fails to deliver on many fronts, most notably the multiplayer. If you are looking for a great multiplayer game with a superb online community, then you need to look at Empire Earth instead. Battle Realms is an online dud not worthy of the reviews that it has achieved for half a game...Otherwise, you will experience perpetual aggravation trying to play online using Gamespy. Also, the interface can be flakey at times. This is another couldabeen game that went out the door too soon.

Gameplay: Battle Realms has 4 clans, two of which play similiar, and two others that can only be found in skirmish. The Dragon and Serpent clans play similiar, and you can play through the campaign as either one. The Lotus and Wolf clans play different, so the gameplay does vary depending on which one you choose. This is a small RTS game where you battle with up to 30 units while utilizing special abilities from each unit. While this does not sound very epic, it is a fast game that requires you to use hotkeys in order to command your troops. If you are a mouse-driven player, this game will be too fast for you. The one major problem with this game is that you can defend or attack, but it is really hard to do both. While the game has 4 towers with stun capabilities that you can place on your base, they are worthless without units that attack. This design promotes turtling since you have an advantage for attacking second. The missions are not that fun for me since the computer always attacks when you take your units away from your base. There are 2 resources used for unit and building purchases, while a third yin/yang resource is used for upgrade purchases. You acquire Yin or Yang in battle, depending on which faction you choose.

I find training the units to be annoying since you have to send them to one building and then to another to "train" them. While this is an intersting concept, it is more tedious than just selecting a building to train a unit. You can select the gathering point to go to another building, but you have to constantly move those around to change what type of unit is being trained.

Graphics: This game is loaded with eyecandy and is one of the best looking RTS games ever made. If you like graphics, this game has it in spades with stellar unit animations, 3D graphics, and outstanding battle visuals.

Sound: The sound and music is well done and fitting for the environment. The notifications for rice and water outages are completely annoying though.

The REAL review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I got this game quite a while ago and I can honestly say that most of the reviews are way off. First let me tell you a little about the game.

The resource and production systems are simple. There are only 2 resources, rice and water. You cannot build rice fields, they are premade to the map you are on. If you run out of rice you have to find anther rice field or water the rice to make it grow faster. Very simple.

There are a limited number of people your town can support, depending on the map. You periodically get a new peasant after a certain amount of time and you can put him to work or train him into other units. You can train in multiple buildings to get lots of different units. For example send a peasant into a tavern and he becomes a swordsman, then send him into an archery range and he becomes a bandit. Send the bandit into an alchemists hut and he becomes a Ronin.

Despite what some reviews claim, you cannot win simply by massing all the high-level units. Every unit has a weakness, for example Ronin die very quickly by fire and explosive damage. (I mean quick, 2 hits from a pitch slinger. . .)

Also you can give each unit a "battlegear" that can be used in battle. For example a raider can be given caltrops or bushfire. Bushfire sets all rice and trees nearby on fire and caltrops can be dropped behind him as a trap.

There is also a building for defense called a watchtower. They are extremely tough. You can only build 4 but people still complain that it is too many for multiplayer games because people can "turtle" in their base and be unstoppable.

Upgrades to units are handled in the form of yin/yang points. When you do damage to enemies you gain these points gradually, and you can invest them in upgrades or, if you have a keep you can summon heros, monks, and ninja to reinforce your army.

Most maps also have wild horses. All the clans except wolf can tame horses and then put units on the ride them. Almost all units can ride horses... pretty much all but the big fatso units. The wolf clan feeds the horses to the wolves, allowing you to take wolves with you in battle to reinforce your troops. The horses have their own battlegears, trample and firebreath.

There are 2 ways to play. Kenji's journey is the standard 1 player game, and there are skirmishes. Skirmishes can be multiplayer or single player with computers as well.

That's all the game info you'll need. Now here's what I like about the game:
Graphics and Sound - Very good quality. Most of the units look and sound cool and say cool things.
Customization - Your army is very customizable. If you want an army with lots of archers that can rain fire upon the enemy buildings you can have it. If you'd rather have a bunch of healers on horses, using the horses to trample and then healing the horses you can do that too.
4 Clans to choose from - Dragon, Serpent, Wolf, and Lotus. Each have their own units, buildings, etc. They aren't exact copies of each other under different names like some RTS games.
Handicap - You can set yourself to have an advantage or disadvantage against your opponents.
Map Editor - Just recently there was a map editor added in battlepack 2 (the second patch) so you can make your own skirmish maps!

Things I don't like about Battlerealms
Bloodthirst - All the units in your army are thirsty for blood and will rush any opponents in sight. You can tell them to hold their ground, but certain conditions cause this order to be canceled. The worst thing is the geisha (healers) are just as bloodthirsty as the other units, and they run off to die if you let them.
High Yin/Yang Peasant rates when low - Another annoying thing is that when you have no peasants or yin/yang points, that first peasant or point comes really quick. This can be abused in multiplayer to summon lots of 1 yin/yang heros and it makes finishing off the enemy cities a chore, since there are constantly peasants coming at you.
Annoying AI - some of the AI computers do annoying things, like constantly start new cities, and harass your troops to get them to run away from base. This takes away from the fun factor by forcing you to pay attention while your trying to do other things.
Bugs - A lot of these have been corrected by the first 2 patches, but there are still a lot more out there.
Slow Internet Play - Multiplayer is annoyingly hard to get started and particularly slow on battlerealms.

Overall rating 4/5

this game is tight, yo!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 12, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Battle realms is an all around good game with excellent graphixs and goofy characters.What makes this game different though is that it's 3-D. Unlike starcraft or any other strategy game it's not 2.5 d. Any way it's a good game and here's why.
GRAPHICS:8/10. Well the 3-d characters have there advantages. Like the fight scenes are a lot more interesting because being 3-d makes the soldiers able to do more stuff. Although i kinda like the old sprite looking guys.
SOUND:8/10. Some characters good voices while others are cheesy. like the dragon dudes.
CONTROLS:9/10. If you've played any other strategy game you'll feel right at home. Nothing new and improved though.
INGENUITY:10/10: This is perhaps where battle realms does the best. First off, there's 6 clans (If I remember correctly). But you don't just get guys. You train peasants then make them train in different army places. But the peasants can train in more than one, making tons of combos. And there different in every race. THAT is cool.
Overall:8/10. It's good, but not outstanding. If you can only buy 1 game, wait for Warcraft III. The only real flaw in this game is that there's no MAC version! What's up that???

Challenging, Addictive, and Extremely FUN to play

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

A combination of good graphics and well-defined, cool-looking characters -- I'd say better than WarCraft III. Creative Japanese theme... you harvest rice and collect water as resources.

Has MANY well-thought of features and game-play details. For example:
Peasants gather resources faster if you place one of the Masters in the ricefield, or a Kabuki warrior (historically Japanese entertainer).

Every character has multiple moves and circle around each other during battle -- unlike WC3 -- this gives a very fluid feel to the fights.

Learning curve is low as everything operates on mouse with few keyboard shortcuts to remember.. WITHOUT sacrificing variety of possible strategies. Basically User Friendly interface.

So let's pose the question: Which of the following is most interesting in Battle Realms...
- visual effects
- simplicity of the gameplay
- variety of strategies that are available
- online play
- story line

Answer: YES!
If you like RTS, you'll enjoy this one... There's a reason it's got nearly 5 stars with close to 50(!) reviews~

One IMPORTANT thing... download the BattlePacks (patches) from battlerealms.com. BattlePack3 makes it so MUCH more challenging.

Original game with good graphics...that's it

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: January 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game, played it for a night, and returned it to get Ghost Recon (which happened to ROCK).

Pros:
-It's playable out of the box. I used to not care about this so much, but now I don't expect every game to work right away. How tragic.
-The graphics are excellent. I was very impressed.
-The game is very original. Resources like water and rice that grows make the game more interesting. The unit alchemy is a very new concept. Horses are really cool in the game.

Cons:
-All in all, the game wasn't all the fun after a while. I just went back to playing Civ 3 and Dark Age of Camelot.
-The battles, though they look cool, are not fun to fight.
-The resource cap is VERY annoying.
-The unit alchemy system means that making all of your peasants into the top unit is really all you need to do to dominate. There is no reason to diversify your troops.

Modern software

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: June 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Terrain Graphics and Unit movement Ai are good, but that is about it. The concept of unit alchemy, which is where a unit trains in one building and then another to become more powerful is fairly unique but little else is offered. UNit graphics and animations are dull and uninspired. The game has bugs and little balance. The sound and music are pathetic albeit amusing from time to time. The interface is a crime against gamers. There is a fourty unit population limit and the game grates along slowly anyway. Players are limited to four towers, which are far from impressive. Battle gear and other upgrades can be aquires just like unit alchemy, but fail to make up for the glaring shortcomings of this game.
Overall Reveiw. 2 Stars and a waste of money. Buy Warlords Battlecry 1 or 2.

Battle Realms-The best RTS ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have played BR for quite some time now, and I just have to say that this game is well balanced RTS and one of the best I ever seen. Liquid put alot of time and resources into making this and you can really tell. Liquid is an up and coming company and I look foward to there next release. If it is half as good as BR It will be awesome. If you like RTS please check out this game. It is a must buy for RTS fans.

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