My Brute
So I was on Facebook earlier today, and I noticed one of my friends had a link to something “Awesome” in their status, so I figured I’d give it a try. The “Awesome” link led to a game, called My Brute, and it requested that I make a little avatar dude to challenge my friend. I did, and became instantly hooked with its simplistic gameplay…
Wait, did I say “Game?” I did, and I think that’s something of a misclassification in this case. My Brute presents itself as a place to do battle, to duke it out in a virtual world with your friends. This quickly loses it’s meaning, however, when you realize that there is nothing you can do in the game that will affect the outcome of the battle at all. You can’t select skills for your character, you don’t get to choose your weapons, you aren’t provided the opportunity to advance the attributes you feel are best, and the fights themselves are completely automated. This isn’t a game. This is active spectating.
The interaction with the game is limited to “click on ‘Arena,’ select someone to fight, watch the fight, repeat.” Choosing who to fight could be something of a strategic choice, if you could actually see what you were up against. Instead, you get the characters’ attributes, which are completely misrepresentative (Weapons and abilities decide the victor of most fights, and to find those you would have to open a second browser-tab, find their site, and study each opponent). This is a game of point-and-click chance.
In the strictest sense of the word, it’s a game, but it’s a poorly designed game. Most games are competitive events in which two or more players compete according to rules that govern the use of skill, chance or endurance. What My Brute does is leave everything to chance.
All of your attributes, skills, abilities and weapons are determined randomly. There is a chance your character will be awesome, and a chance your character will not be. While this is amusing as a passtime for a good twenty minutes or so, it doesn’t provide the sort of challenge people require to maintain interest in a game. The game involves zero personal investment from the player and the challenge is completely arbitrary. By providing some sort of interaction with the game, the game would be much improved. A few possibilities:
Character Generation - The game would be a lot more interesting if I could purchase new attributes, skills, abilities and weapons using the experience my Brute gets from each victory. The more powerful the purchase, the more expensive it would be in experience cost.
Per-match Abilities - If all of my stuff is chosen randomly, I should at least be able to choose which things I will be using in my upcoming battles and which one’s I’d rather leave behind. If each level I got a couple of abilities, or a couple of weapons, or a couple of skills, and I had to choose a total of three things to go into the ring with each match, the strategic choice-making would improve the game tenfold. It would also establish something of a metagame for the game, where people would make choices based, not only on which item causes the most damage, but which choice trumps everyone else’ choices.
Battle Planning - This is something akin to selecting actions before declaring them in a role-playing game, or reversed-order initiative. 7th Sea uses this, in that the person with the lowest initiative declares what he is going to try and do, which each person successively higher on the initiative order choosing their actions after. What this means is that if you are trying to kill Mr. Matches the Cat, and I have a higher initiative than you, I can fuck with your shit before Mr. Matches gets hit. If the game allowed us to choose an order in which we’d like to use certain weapons and abilities, it would provide a player-selected fight system in which the player in question doesn’t need to be involved in the fight at the time it’s happening. I could select to use my Little Knife first, my Axe second, and my Net Ability into Shurrikens and then leave. When the fight starts, my character would go through those strategic actions without help from me.
If the good folks at Motion Twin implimented _any_ of these changes, I think the game would be more engaging, fun, and addictive.
