User Reviews (1 - 11 of 50)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

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.

Fun for a week or two

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: February 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have owned this game since it came out. That's around 3 years. This game is not worth the money. I, like many, was very excited about the game when I first got it. I will admit the game is unique, but gets very boring very quickly.

Grapics/Sound - The graphics are not far from perfect. Awesome graphics. Some very realistic and well-recorded sounds accompany the fighting/actions. The voices, however, sound like hobos [paid a small amount] to do stereotypical anime and immigrant imitations. he background music is pretty well, too.

Gameplay - As I said, the gameplay is uniqe, yet bad. Rather than constructing a building that pumps out a type of unit one at a time and whenever you want, you train a peasant from your "Peasant Hut" in the building. There's close-combat training, ranged, and magical/chemical. There are also a few places allowing you to teach the units abilites or give them items, limited to one. That's basically the bare-bone facts that all clans share. There is the good-hearted averaged out "Dragon Clan", the evil counter-parting "Serpent Clan, the stone-age brutes "Wolf Clan", and its slave masters, the dark "Lotus Clan". They all have a large and very differing vary of units, abilities, and way of living itself. Only two resources exist, rice and water. You must also water the rice fields to grow back harvested plants. The construction is painfully slow, yet the combat faster than the blink of an eye. As well as horrible AI and campaign.

Conclusion - When people get the game and play it for five minutes and review it. But the truth is, you'll wear it out in 2 weels still trying to beat the third mission of the campaign. And the fact that no one is ever on-line since the producers never advertise their games, you're limited to playing the brain-damaged AI...

Looks Good--- Plays Bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 8
Date: February 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

When I first played Battle Realms I was amazed at the stunning visuals and great soundtrack. That was all that was great about the product. Battles, which take forever to prepare for, are pointless because you have no control over the units once you right-click attack. The unit alchemy system, seemingly innovative, is just an Age of Empires clone with units instead of buildings. If you like great visuals and standard RTS fare in disguise this game is for you. If you like good games, don't buy this.

Big Potential but

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 24
Date: December 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Battle realms has alot going for it, Cutting edge graphics, slick sound, nice story, and innvation.
However, where it fails, is in The most basic thing, combat.
First of all, I wanna say this game isn't bad, it can be enjoyed if you enjoyed games like RA2, or its expansion.
But those games also had bad combats, why?
The entire fights are simply taking groups of units, charging them into the enemy, and hoping for the best.
"Battle Realms does have a few gameplay issues that diminish some of its strategic appeal, as the action can prove to be difficult to manage" Gamespot said.
Well that's just that.
When I play a strategy game, I play it for the battles.
Games like myth, or Starcraft had awesome battles, same for AOE and Empire Earth.
But when the entire battle is just clicking and hoping, you're losing the strategy in RTS.
Also, resources is this game is something very simple, despite what gamespot said.
Water is endless, and rice can be watered forever.

Also, there's a cap on resorces, which is just plain stupid, after you reach the cap, you don't any more then one waterer, and one ricer, so you just spend it all on units, the best one ofcourse.
Unit balance within the clan is lacking, everybody usually just build the highest ranking unit (by training a peasent in all the facilities), and it's hardly expensive either!
now I ain't saying FX aren't important, but they shouldn't, EVER, be important then gameplay.
X-com1, or starcraft, games with nice graphics, but unbelievable strategic apeal.
A few more complaints.
A. For some reason, the entire map is revealed (tough fogged), so instead of going to places you haven't been, you gotta check the entire freakin' map, because you have theoritticly been anywhere.
B. There is no zoom, no spin, nothing of any graphical manuevering you can do, Why? beats me.
C. Peasents are very suicidal, instead of running as they should, they charge head on into the army.
D. Ranged units are nearly useless, as when approached, they must use their bow/crossbow/whatever in order to melee, and let me tell you, they always get approached.
E. You can only build on flat terrain, there is no flatning like normal RTS. So your buildings are spread thin, and defensive towers are limited at that.
F. I remember being said, that yin/yang points are to be given according to good/bad acts, but it's given according to kills in battle.

Biggest Turnoffs: No unit formations; controlling units while on the attack is cumbersome at best; no hard numbers for units; no group command buttons; no random maps and no map editor.Multiplayer really only playable via broadband connections; a few lockup problems with GeForce cards; Alt-Tab crashes the game (A patch was released that fixes this).

To summirize, This game coulda been great, if the combat was just a bit more focused and less chaotic.
I guess I just want to micromanage.
It's usually frowned upon, But how automatic can the game get!
I felt like I was watching my units fights more then I ordered them to.

If you really want an RTS. With a literaly gigantic community I would go for Empire Earth. There are thousands of players online and the game has 300 units in total. 200 mp and 100 specially for single player. It spans 500,000 years too which is 14 ages. You can choose which ages to play or you can play all of them! From Prehistory to the future. ...

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.

Great graphics, but beyond that....NOT THAT MUCH REALLY !!!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: December 22, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The game has got excellent graphics and superb animation of the characters. Yet, the gameplay gets too boring after a while.
There are hardly any real strategies in that game. You simply build an army and then they hack teh enemy to pieces or get done themselves by the enemy.
Also the game has almost no defense buidings like gun turrets, towers or walls which make it impossible to build a good base or to defend teh buildings. It also takes a lot of tactical aspects out of the game.
Battle realms has a lot of cool features, but it lacks everything that makes a true entertaining RTS game. AOK for example is still fun playing after more than a 100 hours. The same applies to Starcraft. These new 3d RTS games try to impress the player with graphics, but have nothing more to offer.

Fun, but repetitive

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is pretty fun, but there is little variety. I haven't finished the game, but so far, every level is just building up enough forces and wiping out the enemy. This is like Command and Conquer, only the natural resources are unlimited (rice keeps growing, water keeps flowing) and the number of units you can have is limited. In each level, you can only have a certain number of men, around 20 or 30 so far. So it's difficult to have enough men defending the village and still have a large enough attack force. That may increase the challenge, but it is frustrating. It is more involved, too. You have to activate abilities for them to do anything, so you have to watch the fight and use the abilities at the appropriate time. In C&C, it was more getting together a large force and just leaving them to it, or going by stealth and capturing buildings in the enemy base. A problem is that units sometimes don't react very quickly. Some abilities cause this, but they also do it without being afflicted by anything. Also, it allows you to choose to save peasants from tyranny or force them to submit to your will at the beginning. But that seemed to be the only time, which disappointed me. Battle realms is fun, but only some of the time. It doesn't require much attention and can get old quickly. It's cheap, so give it a try.

sometimes AI = computer cheats

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: December 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is a generally good innovative game. But if you play a game just for fun and not for frustration, because after all, it's just a game, then you might think that the computer cheats when you play this game. The AI is different than that of some other games like Microsoft Age of Empires because a wounded unit is more sluggish than when it's healthy. This, in a sense, is a refreshing novelty. However, the frustrations in not being able to control the units make me feel like the computer is programmed to cheat. At normal difficultly level: computer enemy populations grow faster; some of the units refuse to follow direct instructions (ie it would not run away from a fight to save itself or to engage some other unit even when it's perfectly healthy); the musketeer only does what you want it to do after it completely and slowly loads its musket and fires (after which time, it has already been whacked on the head enough times to be useless), the geisha (healer) refuses to stand ground and keeps moving into harm's way; some units immediately run around in circles first before following your instructions. All of this on top of the fact that a computer already has an advantage over the gamer when it comes to controlling all the individual pieces in a real-time game means frustration... and this is just at normal difficulty level with no cheat codes. Yes, this game introduces some interesting innovations, but 5 stars? No.

Don't listen to the hype.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: March 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game had so much potential! I picked this title up ready for a wonderful twist on the old RTS formula. To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement. The four clans graphically are very different, but the strategy is all the same. You rush to build the biggest force and rush the poor sap that hasn't got as large an army. That's it. Yeah there are things like fire arrows, but all the clans have something of the sort so it dosn't really matter which clan you play as. The single player campain is not bad for a RTS, but still needs work. To sum this game up, it's nothing more that Warcaft with another coat of paint. It would be a great bargin bin game, but I would not purchase it at its current price if I had it to do all over again.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 Next 

Actions