Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc Impressions

It's quite possible that the nation of France wouldn't be around today if not for Joan of Arc. That famous 15th century heroine, through sheer force of will and brilliant leadership, roused the sorry remnants of the French armies and beat back the English occupation, unraveling all the progress Henry V had made toward making France a permanent part of "Jolly Old" England. So, for better or for worse, thanks to Joan, France survived and eventually gained a permanent veto in the UN Security Council. Not bad for a teenage girl on the brutal battlefields of medieval Europe. Of course, she did end up burning at the stake for it--but let's focus on the positive side of her story.

Joan's stellar strategic accomplishments are part of the inspiration for Enlight Software's upcoming game, War and Warriors: Joan of Arc. This is one of those hybrid designs that attempts to combine action, adventure, and strategy into an ambitious and, hopefully, easily playable game. We covered the third-person action adventure aspects of Joan of Arc in a recent preview, but we've since been able to spend more time with the game's real-time strategy component.

Interestingly, the third-person action and real-time strategy gameplay in Joan of Arc are closely related. It's not a static game where you play the strategy portion for one level and then switch to the action mode the next. Instead, you'll find yourself on your toes from the get-go, and you'll be switching between the two constantly. For instance, you may be fighting as Joan in the action mode when you notice a wave of English reinforcements heading your way. You can then switch to real-time strategy mode, which pulls the camera back to a top-down view of the world. From there, you can locate some French forces nearby, lasso them with the mouse, and send them your way for some backup. You can then return to third-person mode to get right into the action again.

As you've probably guessed by now, Joan of Arc won't be a conventional real-time strategy game. You don't build bases or cities, nor do you gather resources or churn out units. Instead, your job is to maneuver your forces around the map, while at the same time beating back the enemy in melee combat. While you're zoomed out in the top-down view, the AI takes over the character you were playing to pick up the slack in melee combat.

The forces that you'll use to beat back the English will come from towns and cities that you liberate along the way. Joan can actually be joined by famous historical characters on her journeys, but, in keeping with her historical role in rallying the French, only she can recruit new soldiers at a barracks. There are a variety of different unit types in the game, including archers, crossbowmen, siege engineers, and, of course, swordsmen. You'll group these soldiers into units, each of which is centered on one of the game's main characters, like Joan, Etienne de Vignolles (known more famously as "La Hire"), and Charles of Ponthieu, who would go on to become King Charles VII of France. This means that controlling units is simple, as all you need to do is give the order to the main character, and the other soldiers will follow automatically.

You Don't Know Joan

Joan of Arc also lets you switch between which character you're playing in the action mode, since you don't just play as the titular heroine all the time. As the maps are rather large, you can expect to find your forces scattered in different places, so you'll jump to whichever character is closest to the objective and take control directly. This can be very helpful, since each of the main characters has a certain specialty that you may call upon from time to time. The French countryside, at the time, was littered with castles and keeps. Since, most of the time, these fortifications are in your way, your job is to lay siege to and sack them. Part of the strategy in the game is deciding how you'll go about this task. If you have the Duke of Alencon under you command, you can have him build siege engines to knock the gates down. Jean de Metz, on the other hand, can simply pick the locks. You can even hurl troops at the gates and eventually knock them down, though you'll pay a high price for doing so.

The sieges in Joan of Arc seem similar to those in Medieval: Total War, though they lack any of that game's tactical complexity, so you don't have to worry about managing formations and such. The designers are trying to keep the control scheme simple, mainly for gameplay's sake and partly because Joan of Arc is also being developed for the Xbox, so the interface has to be translatable to a gamepad. Joan of Arc will ship with eight campaigns. While that may sound short, keep in mind that each campaign takes place on large maps with a number of different objectives. Individual castle sieges alone can be epic affairs, as there can very well be hundreds of soldiers involved.

Graphically, the game looks solid. Walking through French towns seems like a very similar experience to exploring a city in Bethesda's vast 3D role-playing game Morrowind, though it's not quite as interactive. Unfortunately, the version of the game we played still didn't have spoken dialogue, though this will be added later. Our major concerns at this point are with the camera and control schemes. Good camera views can be difficult to implement properly in third-person action games, but, for the most part, the camera and controls in Joan of Arc work just fine. However, the game lets you jump on a horse so that you can charge your enemies while mounted. At this point in time, the game's camera seems to have real issues while you're mounted, since your frontal view and peripheral vision are limited, and the control seems clunky. Also, it seems like the pathfinding AI for units in real-time strategy mode could use improvements, since some units seem to get stuck on obstacles and left behind. Fortunately, the game itself is still a work in progress, and, hopefully, Enlight will take note of these concerns and work them out.

The PC version of Joan of Arc is due sometime in January, while the Xbox version is scheduled for May. Hopefully, that should give Enlight enough time to work out the kinks. Then we'll see if this Joan of Arc is ready for the fire.