Brainlord for SNES

Image: MobyGames

Brainlord

Zelda without style

Genre: adventure - overhead

Publisher: Enix

Year: 1994

System: SNES

Gameplay Score: 3

Gameplay Notes:

It's a straight up top-down Zelda clone. Controls are generally good - movement feels good and responsive. You can jump, attack with a wide sword slash and fire a projectile with a charged shot. Buttons can be remapped which is fortunate because the defaults are dumb. A big downside is that enemies hit like a ton a bricks and take way too many hits to kill. They also charge at you and you have no i-frames so they can climb inside your sprite and kill you almost instantly. Prepare to die a lot. This seems weird since the combat is almost an afterthought to the game's actual design. Instead it's all about puzzle solving. Why then is the combat so annoying? Who knows

Level Design Score: 3

Level Design Notes:

For a game designed around its puzzles, you'd think the puzzles would be better. They're either painfully easy to solve or completely unintuitive. Bring a walkthrough

Theme Score: 1

Theme Notes:

I honestly have no idea if there's a story. Oh wait your dad was a knight and told you to be good when he went off to war. Now you're a mercenary who takes jobs like killing all the rats in someone's room. Yeah. You're a noble rat killer, like a housecat. The theme and setting are extremely wanting in this game.

Art Style Score: 4

Art Style Notes:

To be fair, the dungeons and backgrounds are well drawn, but nothing about this game's artwork stands out. It's patently unoriginal. It looks like a hundred other games. The sprites are sort of ugly, particularly your character who has the tiniest head of all time. Honestly. His shoulder pads are each larger than his pinhead. Maybe he's the guy from Altered Beast? I'm dogging on it but the graphics are ok. Certainly not as bad as something like Paladin's Quest, but they could've been so much better. Some nice effects and excellent performance make them better than average.

Audio Score: 4

Audio Notes:

Typical Enix goodness. The music has a Castlevania vibe to them, with some Indian flare similar to the music in Skyblazer. Good stuff

Overall Score: 62

Review ID: 72