Braveland Wizard

The game is fun. The battles play out much like Heroes of Might and Magic or King's Bounty. For the price however the game is a bit short.

This is going to be much like my review for the original Braveland. This game is a fun turn-based, hexagonal board game in the mold of Heroes of Might and Magic with a map progression in the Mario level selection screen realm. There's no real story and the game is pretty straight forward and linear. Only three times do you get to choose something different, the first two you either chose left or right at a fork in the road that leads you to the same path, and the third is how you want the end of the story to read. There's also a quiz after the second to last battle with 3 questions that will reward you with a prize if you answer all 3 correctly. There are no second chances if you fail. So pay attention during the game. There are 3 difficulty settings. You get to level up your hero (that never fights) but that increases the potential size of the armies you control. You can acquire 4 types of gear that benefits your armies. You have to spend money to recruit most of your army. Money is obtained mostly by defeating the enemy and minimizing your losses during combat. THERE IS MUCH LESS MONEY PER COMBAT THAN THE LAST GAME. So there's more of a grind. There are 3 separate respawning points that you can grind out on to get more gold. There's about 35-40 different enemies (some from the original) that you can run into and they each have their strengths and weaknesses that blend together with other enemies. Almost every unit you have gets a special ability at some point. This game also introduces talent/spell trees to give a little more flavor of what strategy you want to take. It's a lot more interesting than the last game but the game still only takes about 3-5 hours. It's worth it if you get it on sale but I wouldn't pay the full asking price for a game that you can beat after you get home from work and before you go to bed.

Firstly: the game is fun :). Other than that, there's only so much strategic depth. At one point the battles even seemed a bit alike - fortunately, the game started throwing more complicated challenges later on (the desert required a bit of thinking). It's good if you don't want to care about building your kingdom's economy or make too many hard choices about recruiting monsters (you have all your recruited troops at disposal, choosing up to a fixed "star value" total between battles as your line-up). In my opinion the pros are: works out of the box, looks cute, can be started and closed in a few minutes after one battle, is interesting enough to warrant to two play-throughs (with differents spell sets and units used). Buy it if you want quick fun for a couple of days, something to switch to at work or if you want to introduce a younger/less experienced gamer to turn-based strategy. Don't buy if you want multi-level tech trees, complicated unit interactions, long spellbooks and uncovering complexity over weeks of gameplay.

Excellent tactical combat in a series of relatively quick battles, with some dialogue and story thrown on. Obviously a mobile port (in-game buttons ARE REALLY HUGE) with annoying social media LIKE ME buttons as well (on the main screen). But otherwise an excellent way to spend a couple of hours blasting ghouls with magic.