Game #968: Brave

 In my time, Brave used to be a little pig. 

 I never thought I'd play Brave, mainly because I never EVER cared about the film or the game. But I really wanted Epic Mickey, and the only seller that had it on sale on my local online store would only sell it as part of a bundle.... so I said what the hell, gimme both.

 The game might follow the story of the movie or it might not, I've no idea and I don't really care. It's the story of how Merida turned her mother and little brothers into bears, is this a Brother Bear reboot?, and must now turn them back by purifying the land and ridding the world of Morl'du, an evil bear. If it does follow the plot of the movie, which I think it does since turning her mother into a bear sounds like too big a plot point as to use it on a licensed game, then it's disappointing how instead of scenes from the movie we get hand-drawn art for cutscenes. Cheapskates!

 Brave is a Twin-Stick shooter that can only be played with the Wiimote+Nunchuck combo. A Twin-stick shooter with a single stick and using the directional pad to shoot. It works about as well as you'd expect, because you don't get the full 360 degrees of range. There's a soft-auto aim to compensate for this, but it's not good enough. The controls themselves are just not good enough. Attacking with your sword is done by flailing your arms, but if you swing too little the game won't register it, and if you swing too fast you won't get the combo, so attacking with the sword is very cumbersome. Jumping is done with the A button, so if you want to jump while shooting you'll have to grip the Wiimote in a weird claw-like fashion, very uncomfortable.

 As you go through the first few levels you'll collect four different medallions that change the element of your weapons, both sword and bow, to Fire, Ice, Earth and Wind. Every monster is weak to a specific element, but the game is nice enough to highlight every enemy's weakness. These medallions are also used to clear 'puzzles', but the game tells you what element to use where, so there's not much thinking involved.

 The game is made up of 8 short stages, the entire game took me three hours to complete. Every stage has a decent amount of collectibles to find: Costumes, new weapons and permanent upgrades. Defeating enemies and breaking up pieces of the environment rewards you with gold that you can use on the store to buy new moves or enhancements to your existing moves. In this area definitely the game shines, as getting stronger as well as new swords and bows that have different appearances makes you giddy to search for every collectible, as easy as they are to spot.

 To shake things up, every now and then you'll play as Merida's bear-mom. Her segments are super easy, just spam the B button and you'll wreck everything in sight. You'll also get puzzles in which you play as her three little bear-brothers, and these puzzles were pretty decent since you have to swap between all three brothers to solve them.

 There's a two player mode, but the second player is forced to play as a boring wisp.

 Lastly, for a Wii game, it's quite pretty. You won't often see the character models up close, but Merida looks fantastic, and the environments are quite pretty to look at. But there's a caveat... the framerate is very poor, feels like the game runs at 25 frames per second most of the time.

 Brave was slightly better than what I expected but that doesn't mean it's a particularly good game. The control issues are impossible to ignore, but considering how the core gameplay is... it might be a decent game for fans of the movie... albeit on the other platforms.

 5.0