Cateia Games Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World review

Kaptain Brawe (pronounced ‘brave’, short for Bravurskij) is a heroic, enthusiastic and basically dim officer of the Space Police with a mediocre grasp on spoken English. Investigating a crashed space ship, he stumbles upon a plot to kidnap alien scientists, goes head to head against the forces of corruption and comes up against the notoriously evil – and shapely – mercenary known only as ‘She’.

Brawe’s world has vague overtones of steampunk – hardly surprising given that it’s set in an alternate past, in which the Polar Ion Drive built by James Watt has sent mankind to the stars in the 19th century. It’s not all waistcoats and brass computers, though. Apart from Brawe’s own ship and wooden robot, the style of the settings and technology ranges from 50s B-Movie outfits to crystal-powered alien cloning technology.

Players used to modern adventures with full voice casts may be disappointed to learn that there’s not a single line of speech in the game. However, reading is a big improvement on low-quality voice acting, and you’re never presented with an impenetrable wall of text. The musical score is great and sound effects are well placed, so we never missed spoken dialogue.

We were impressed by the lush, brightly-coloured graphics, which combine hand-drawn backgrounds with 3D character models. The screen size is locked to a 4:3 aspect ratio, though, so widescreen users will have to put up with black bars to the left and right of the screen.

Hitting the right balance between plot and puzzling is hard in any adventure game. Unfortunately, many puzzles are obvious, while others feel gratuitous and unrelated to the plot – we were particularly irritated by a cemetery where gravestones are inexplicably marked with codes instead of names.

As the game progresses, Brawe is joined by Luna, an infinitely more competent internal affairs officer, and Danny, a reformed space pirate. The new characters allow the welcome addition of cooperative puzzles, including one of our favourites, which calls for two characters to manipulate the results of a personality test.

Kaptain Brawe is a loving recreation of classic adventure game style and its author has made a convincing job of it. However, we’d have liked more of the originality that we saw in the game’s later puzzles. We doubt that most people will take more than five or six hours – at most – to finish the game, but it’s worth having if you’re a fan of point and click adventures.