Brainlord for SNES
Review #72
Brainlord
Zelda without style
Gameplay
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
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
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
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
Typical Enix goodness. The music has a Castlevania vibe to them, with some Indian flare similar to the music in Skyblazer. Good stuff
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