Brave Dwarves II Review

Okay, so do you remember that Apogee game Math Rescue? Math problems, funky enemies, varied levels, right? Lots of fun-- when you were six. Now, do you remember that time when everyone just adored animated GIFs? Come to think of it, neither do I; I think I was about eight when they started showing up, and I hated them immediately.

Now, imagine someone had forced Math Rescue to breed with a huge collection of animated GIFs, and then castrated the result. That's pretty much Brave Dwarves 2.

To begin with, the text for this game looks like it was written by a middle-schooler; the instructions are uninformative and written in broken English, the... plot? what plot?

The first thing I noticed after the gratingly bad instructions, before even beginning to play, was the incredibly annoying background noises. The main menu broadcasts the same high-pitched cricket noise over and over again; my cat freaked out immediately.

Upon entering the game, the graphics don't look too bad. The motion is... sluggish, but acceptable; gone is the rapid, fluid motion of Math Rescue, but it's similar enough that I wouldn't be suprised if they'd ripped the sprite engine straight out of Apogee's code.

And then you notice that every single thing in the game spins, or orbits, or flickers, or twists, or… well, it's an epileptic's nightmare. If you think it's grating after five minutes, image what's it like after an hour, or more… there are eight levels, and each would probably take about an hour. For my sanity's sake, I played through only one level.

The background music is a soul-numbingly generic MIDI on constant loop, with equally generic fantasy noises playing at regular intervals, like the same wolf that howls in exactly the same way every thirty seconds.

The game truly falls apart with the gameplay, however. There are perhaps five enemies, and all are insultingly simple save for the bees. I hate those bees. The game as a whole is ridiculously easy, especially once you figure out the shop and can actually equip (which it doesn't explain) the cheap instant-kill-everything items. The goal, to collect keys then go through a door, can be achieved by running around randomly picking things up until you've got the keys and you're through a door (unmarked on the map), is to kill a boss. I discovered after Astral Raining a pack of four bees that they were the boss. Who knew?