Brave: The Video Game is a movie-licensed game that is targeted at children. While there have been a few games that have succeeded in juggling this double threat, it’s a lot more common that a game that falls into these categories is either terrible or completely forgettable. So how does this game stack-up? Well, it comes with a free ticket to the movie… and that’s probably the best thing about it.

Brave: The Video Game is of course based on the Disney Pixar Film of the same name and follows the second half of the film, so I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum. In this game, you play as princess Merida, who must undo a curse she accidentally put on her family. To accomplish this, she must destroy an evil magic bear named Mor’du (no, seriously) and purify its influence on the land. In case you’re wondering, the game takes a LOT of liberties with the story and unfortunately, this is to the game’s detriment since the game claims to have the same themes but doesn’t have a plot to support it. The game, like the movie, claims to be about a mother and daughter having to work out their differences but the game barely has any scenes where Merida and her mother are together, instead focusing more on Merida’s efforts to purify the waystones that are scattered throughout the levels, so at the end of Merida’s mostly solo adventure you get hit with a moral that falls flat. You also don’t run into any of the fun characters from the movie outside of a quick cutscene with the witch, meaning the only voice you’ll ever hear is Kelly Macdonald, the voice actor who plays Merida, who clearly was only brought in for an hour or two of recording as she doesn’t have much unique dialogue; you’re mostly hearing the same lines over and over again. Overall, this feels very shoddy and is likely going to disappoint fans of the movie who want to interact with the characters.

FERGUS AS "SIR NOT APPEARING IN THIS GAME".

From a presentation standpoint, Brave is just laughable. The environments are extremely bland and the game will use any excuse it can to put you in a cave or any other area where a single color fills the area. To top it off, the graphics and effects are bad, at the worst of times having textures and models (especially enemy models) looking like they should have come out during the middle of the last console generation, which is rather surprising since UP: The Game–released three years–had colorful and up-to-date graphics. The music fares better, but that’s only because it was allowed to use a few pieces from the movie, giving the title screen and first level a much more epic feel. The original music in later levels is very forgettable though. On the whole, the levels are very forgettable and look sub-par.

Gameplay is an area where the developers come the closest to creating an entertaining experience, but it has its own issues. At its core, the game is an action-platformer with some small puzzles tossed in to pad out the game. While the gameplay isn’t particularly complex when compared to say, God of War, and it fails to have variation outside of “go into dark cloud, kill swarm of enemies,” it does have some nice touches with its bow combat. In this game, while you do have a sword, you’ll be doing almost all of your fighting and puzzle-solving with your bow. The bow is controlled and aimed by the right thumbstick, as though the game was a twin-stick shooter, but the game will adjust the height of the shots to assist in hitting enemies and switches; which is a definite boon to young players and creates a happy medium between no aim-assist and auto-lock. The bow and sword can also be given elemental properties by charms you find in the game. This allows you to activate switches and create platforms and fight off enemies (all of whom have specific elemental weaknesses). While this may sound pretty standard fare, the game tosses in charge attacks for each type of elemental shot that can be useful even if they aren’t what the enemy is weak against. For example, the earth charge shot summons little minions who will suicide bomb enemies and does tons of damage to all enemies while the ice charge shot can freeze enemies in place, giving you time to escape. The arrows also have a power attack that allow you to temporarily spam special shots that are less powerful than their charged counterparts but are just as useful.

Hope you enjoy shooting this enemy since there are only like five other types of enemies.

However, if you want to use the power attacks and charge shots (which are necessary for boss fights since normal shots do almost no damage on all difficulties past ‘normal’), you’ll have to buy them from a merchant (who is a non-speaking stone) and this is where the game’s flaws start: you have to buy almost all your moves, including both your dodge ability and every type of charge shot, which you must have if you want to have any hope of beating the bosses. For comparison, last week saw the release of Lollipop Chainsaw, a game which required you to buy combos from a shop to turn your button presses into special attacks, but you always had access to the rest of your abilities; buying stuff helped you but wasn’t necessary. Brave, meanwhile, makes you buy things you need to beat the game. While at first I only considered this a nitpick, since the game does give enough money to buy upgrades and you can always repeat levels to get more money, I realized that the younger group of gamers this game targets might not have enough experience with this genre to pick the right upgrades, forcing them to play through the bland levels again to grind gold or get stuck on a boss fight. While I’d still say this is one of the game’s smaller problems, it is something to keep in mind.

The store becomes a bigger problem if you try the shoddy co-op, however. In co-op, the second player takes the role of a wisp with all of Merida’s abilities, which is fine until you realize that gold is shared between the two players and only the first player gets to decide how the money is spent, so expect fighting between players to break out when the first player buys an upgrade for him or herself and gives the second player the shaft. The first player also gets to solo the puzzle-sections and the sections where you control a bear to kill enemies. While neither of these sections are particularly fun, the puzzles are insultingly easy, even for very young children and kill the game’s pacing, while the bear sections are impossible to fail, it means that the second player will be forced to twiddle their thumbs while the first player gets to control everything. While I can appreciate adding a co-op system so kids can play with their friends this feature is so badly implemented that it is likely to just develop a growing dislike between the players.

The final feature that was badly designed in this game is the camera, which you have no control over due to the right thumbstick being used for combat. The camera’s main issue is that it loves taking bad angles and zooming out too far. While the camera is fine when you aren’t doing precise jumping or in massive fights, during these two events, the camera loves screwing with you by either making it look like you should make jumps you are missing or by zooming out during fights without centering on you, so you are too tiny to properly make out amongst the large swarms of enemies. This issue gets far worse during boss fights (which all consist of giant versions of normal enemies). The camera will either focus on the boss, making you even harder to see, or will focus on you, making bosses who can toss health destroying projectiles not even appear on screen. While some of the other problems I’ve discussed are forgivable but regretful in a game intended for children, this is just inexcusable.

Think of the bear children! buy them Lego Batman 2 instead.

So, overall, is the game bad? Well, that’s the sticky part. While I may have bemoaned this game’s features and problems, I have to look at it from the perspective of a game aimed at kids and, sad as I am to say this, Brave is a fairly average game in that category. Sure, it doesn’t try to defy expectations, but it doesn’t have to; its customer base is tied into a Disney movie so it’s almost guaranteed to make its budget back no matter what and it’s not like a majority of children’s games do try to be innovative while targeting kids. The Lego Games and Double Fine’s forays into family games are unfortunately the exception, not the rule. To be fair, there are certainly worse games you could give a child and Brave will keep children entertained for at least the first three levels, fights about upgrades aside, so it is a decent time waster, but is that really what children’s entertainment should be? While this game certainly isn’t a hellspawn that is ruining gaming it’s very unremarkable and is only amazing in it mediocrity. If your kid or a gamer you know is really begging you to get this for them, do both of you a favor and just rent it from Redbox so you’re only a couple dollars out when he or she gets bored or finishes it in about 6-7 hours. Children deserve better than this.

This game was purchased for review from a retailer and played to completion in about 7 hours. The title was played on Xbox 360, but is also available for PS3, PC, Wii, and Nintendo DS.

Brave: The Video Game Review

By Gabriel B.

Brave: The Game is a movie-licensed game aimed at children. How good can it possibly be?