This review is for the multiplayer strategy game Brotherhood of battle. Overall, this is an excellent multi-player strategy game well balanced in research, recruitment of units, and combat. The graphics were well-done and the gameplay was smooth with no notice-able game-play errors. However, there are some serious issues in the game that I do believe need to be addressed. The first glaring one is that there is no single player besides the tutorial and you have to play multi-player if you wish to play the game.

This makes it so you cannot truly get used to the feel of the game before going online against other players. This also means that there is no story-line to the game. Many strategy fans like myself play the games partially because we want to see how the story unravels. Not having one was a big letdown in this game. My other main complaint builds upon the first one in that once one player leaves, the game is over. It was particularly hard to actually play a full game. Most of the time, my screen displayed “victory” right after the game loaded because my opponent left. Now, as much as I enjoy winning, this got annoying after a while. There were also several games where the opponent just left after the first combat phase and the game ended in victory for me. What would take this game up another level is the inclusion of some kind of AI to take over if a human opponent leaves. This would allow people to actually finish a game every once in a while. I’ve tried to play over 10 games, not one of them was complete. This takes a lot away from the enjoyment of the a game. But besides those two serious nagging complaints, this is a great game that seemed to have gotten high ratings from just about everywhere. In the games where people actually stayed for a while, I found this to be a great combination of strategy and tactics.

If you are looking for strategy, I suggest that just keeping all your units grouped together with the big swordsman is front is about enough to beat most opponents as they won’t move in formation and will leave their weaker units exposed. Be sure to get the gold mine next to you and research so you can produce units. I haven’t played many full games, but the ones I did play, I was easily able to get an advantage just by keeping my units in basic formation with the big swordsman in front followed by the thief, archer, and mage behind.

However, if you want more advanced tutorials, I suggest you take a peek at the following videos:

Beginner’s guide:

Unit types:

Upgrades and research:

For more tutorials, you can go to the Official tutorials site

Tags: multiplayer, tactics, war

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Strategy/war Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.