Wrath Unleashed

Written by Tim Stevens  on February 25, 2004

Full Review: When cross-genre breeding goes too far.

Tweet

Comments

Ever get a sudden longing for some visceral fighting-game action in the middle of a drawn-out strategy game session? Or, did you ever stop to think while playing Tekken "Gee, this game would be a lot more fun with hexes." No? Well, it seems the folks over at Lucasarts and The Collective were plagued with such conflicting longings and to satisfy themselves produced Wrath Unleashed, an odd tasting blend of 3-D fighting and turn-based strategy games. While blending genres is certainly nothing new, sometimes two genres just weren't meant for each other, and that seems to be the case here.

Taking the time to explain the details of the plot here would make this review about three times longer, and, since the plot has nothing to do with the gameplay, would be a total waste of time. Suffice it to say there are four melodramatic gods fighting over something or another that's apparently quite desirable, each god loving or hating each of the three others, thus leading to plenty of conflict.

To play the game you choose one of the four gods, each having a certain D&D-like moral alignment: light chaos, dark chaos, light order, or dark order. Each god has an army of creatures of varying strengths and abilities. Certain creatures are large, strong, and slow with plenty of health, while others are small and weak but can fly across the terrain, terrain made up of every strategy gamer's favorite shape: the hexagon.

When you begin the battle you're presented with a 3-D view showing the entire map and all of the creatures on it. Each player goes in turn, either moving a single creature or casting a spell. When one of your creatures lands on an enemy creatures' hex battle ensues, and it's then the game rips off its drab strategy exterior to expose the unexpected 3-D fighting game buried within.

Strategy games traditionally determine the victory of a battle based on the opposing units' relative stats, maybe with a bit of randomness thrown in there to keep it interesting. But Wrath takes a very different approach with its fighting game within a strategy game. Here you must actually take control of your creature over a small 3-D arena and manually beat the bejesus out of your opponent if you want to win the hex. While certain creatures are much stronger than others, it's entirely possible for a small and outmatched creature to pull off the upset if the person holding the controller knows what they're doing.

This is an interesting twist on the strategy genre, one that adds some action to what would otherwise be a seriously stale game. Unfortunately, this twist is too severe to work. If the fighting portions were well-balanced and fun to play that would be one thing, but too often you can win just by mashing the fast attack button, or by running away and performing ranged attacks. It's a mediocre fighting game buried within this strategy game, which again could be forgiven if the strategy aspect of the game was great, but unfortunately that part has its problems too.

The actual strategy aspects of the game are fairly limited. Different types of terrain either help or hinder your creatures in battle, so you have to encourage battles to happen on your particular kind of terrain. Really, that's about as complicated as it gets here. Beyond that, you just need to try to use your big monsters against their little ones and you'll do fine. With each player moving just one character per turn, it's difficult to establish any kind of momentum on the map, as each player slowly chips away at the other. Thanks to this, and each player's ability to resurrect the dead, battles often go on and on and on much longer than you'd like them to. The frustration caused by never-ending battles is compounded by a ridiculous turn-counter in campaign mode that gives you an automatic loss if you take too long. Even so, completing the campaign mode shouldn't take long. The game features quite an array of options for multiplayer matches, but without Live support, finding someone to play with could be difficult.

Just like the conflicting styles of gameplay, the graphics are strangely mismatched. The frequent and droning cut-scenes are populated by ugly 3-D models representing the gods, but the creatures they command are actually very impressively detailed. Unfortunately, most of them are bizarre looking and oddly designed; yet almost all are very well animated. A real mixed bag. Audio is similarly dichotic, with good voice actors reading ridiculous scripts, and fair to decent music and effects.