Joan of Arc Review
Sia 'Garrett' Manzari, 2004-03-17

Trevor Chan's Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc puts you in France in the year 1429. France is overrun by the English intruders and you must liberate the country with Jeanne d'Arc and her companions in 8 missions. Read on to learn, if it is fun or work to liberate France!

Everything begins quite calm when you have to make your way to Orleans with Jean Metz, and the first mission is already completed within ten minutes or so. And as there are only 8 missions, you may think, the game is over soon, maybe too soon?...Wrong! The game becomes harder and harder with each mission - areas becomer larger and larger - and enemies become more and more numerous...

As mentioned, the game is split in 8 missions. In each mission, you have some main goals and several side goals to achieve. In the first 4 missions you walk or ride through the areas and beat up every Englishman you encounter. In mission two for example, you have to defend Orleans against an English siege. Speaking of Orleans, cities are worked out exremely nice, I do not say they look nice, but their architecture, the castle walls with the walkway, their houses are extremely nice and different with each city or castle. In cities that belong to the French you can shop either food (to heald or fill up energy) or weapons and armour. No other house can be entered, but sometimes citizens give you valuable information or even quests!

Combat takes place in real time of course, either ranged or celose. Ranged combat is extremely fun with explosive arrows or bolts: Shoot arrows in a gathering of hostile fighters and most of them drop down. Repeat until they're dead - hehe!
Close combat is combinaton of fast and furious regular, combo and energy attacks. Energy attacks are especially fun when you are surrounded by dozens of enemies and that you are often, believe me! Close combat is definately the strong side of Joan of Arc and one of the game's main aspects.

When it comes to combat, you have to consider the enemies' AI as well of course, and that is not a very advanced part in the game. Despite the fact, that the engine can handle up to 2000 units per map, their behaviour is quite stupid at times. Enemies do indeed run away and hide, when in battle, but sometimes you fight a group of enemies with another group standing some 20 feet away and not doing anything. It is ok for you, the player, because there are enough enemies to fight already, but this does somehow leave a bitter taste on the combat...well...anyway...let's take a look at the look of the game!

The graphics are quite good, but not superb. The line of sight is a little too limited for my taste with objects popping out of a virtual fog. Water and its reflections looks quite nice with every unit, along with their animations, accurately reflected.
You can also experience weather changes as well as day and night cycles - not that it was important when playing the game though. The characters are very nicely animated, and combat moves are nice to watch, that is, if you see them, because most of the times you hardly know which enemy you fight from mission 5 on because of the massive numbers of enemies!

Next to the visuals also the sound of a game is important! In Joan of Arc, the music ist really fantastic & overwhelming. Both Marc Derell and Rednote Audio did a tremendous job! Alas, the sound effects are ok only anymore, where some sounds in combat sound very strange really...and unfortunately, the voice actors are sub-par and too low, so you don't understand them at all. This becomes extremely annoying, when they talk to you during combat, when you have neither the time to listen to them nor is it by no means silent enough to understand them! To make thing even worse, they talk to you even if they are hunddreds of yards away. As this technique is also used to advance the story, the presentation of the stors is sub-par as well. Where the story is not very good itself, you sometimes do not understand what's going on due to the above reasons and simply fight your way through each area without having a clue why! On the positive side, the in game brief is excellent and holds all of teh necessary information, like a zoomable map of the mission, both in 2D and 3D, all obejctives, all towns and more!

Joan of Arc was announced as a 3D Strategy Action RPG, so where's the strategy so far? It begins with mission 5, from where on you can switch into RTS mode anytime, but you should do that only, when you need cannons to destroy towers or gates (while the latter can be destroyed by explosive arrows as well). Otherwise, the strategy part is totally useless and really hard to control and you find yourself switching back to the action mode again. Also the system with several commanders, whose roles you can take over anytime, does not work really, because once they're in combat, they're simply not good enough to survice on their own and, even worse, they're not clever enough to heal themselves, so you have to switch between them all the time! So you're better off storming castles alone on your own!

Of course, fighting on your own leaves you with dozens of dozens of enemies. Joan must be feeling like Neo against all those Agent Smiths in Matrix most of the times, but amazingly she is strong enough to beat them all up! Hostorically silly, but extremely enjoyable...at first at least. Missions become repetitive and after mission 5 (quite loooong already) you have to force yourself from mission 6 on to carry on. Even though there are some new aspects, foremost the strategy mode from mission 5 on, and new kind of missions, e.g. to collect a certain amount of money, or to bribe mercenaries or to free prisoners, the game gets more and more booring the longer it lasts.
Had I written this review after mission 3 or 4, I would have given it a good 80% rating despite its flaws, but it gets less with each mission you have to start, which is a pity, because there si great potential in Joan of Arc!

Let's take a short look at the RPG system also: With each slain enemy, Joan (or any other commander) gets experience points and once a new level is reached, you can advance you stats and learn new attacks...a simple, but working and motivating RPG system! In addition each commander has an inventory for new armour or weapons, magical artifacts that increase your stats, food and do on and you can also exchange items between the 'party', which is inevitable at times because some weapons can be used by special commanders only!

Overall, Joan of Arc is a good game, with many flaws on the one hand, but also very enjoyable on the other. It has great combat and a motivating RPG system. And, unfortunately it has great potential, but it is not worked out! It could have been a really great title with shorter and more interesting missions and with either no RTS part at all or an improved RTS part. But the way it is right now, missions are way to repetitive and the presentation of the story is too bad. Maybe a few more months of extra polishing would have done it good? Still worth a look!