Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc Exclusive Preview

History books tell us that Joan of Arc was a pretty serious young woman. The poor French shepherd-turned-crusader was fanatically devout--she was said to have heard voices in her head that encouraged her to fight for Charles VII and to liberate Orleans and the Loire valley--as well as conservative to the point that she forbade her troops to use profanity. She wore men's clothing, and she was eventually burned at the stake as a heretic. That doesn't exactly fit the profile typically associated with computer game heroines, who can often be found sporting chain-mail bikinis and who certainly never end up getting burnt to a crisp.

It's not surprising, then, that Enlight Software isn't being too strict about authenticity in its upcoming game based on the life of this unusual historical figure. Judging by the early version of Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc that we've been playing for the past couple of weeks, the Hong Kong-based developers will apparently make Saint Joan out to be more Lara Croft than frumpy Christian martyr. At this point in development, the game looks like a fairly conventional third-person action-adventure game, albeit one with a unique protagonist who can also lead the charge in strategic battles.

Lead developer Trevor Chan, best known for pure strategy efforts like Capitalism and Seven Kingdoms, is trying to create a genre-bending experience that includes aspects of action, adventure, and strategy gaming. Play begins with Joan fighting with the assistance of her squire and a few allied warriors. You guide her in a third-person camera perspective just as you would the lead character in any other action adventure game. As time goes on, however, you acquire more abilities and responsibilities, just as Joan herself did during her campaigns with the French army in the 1420s. Eventually, you gain access to a real-time command interface where you take control of entire medieval battles and wage war from the general's saddle.

But unlike a lot of cross-genre gaming experiments, the game seems to attempt to ensure that all aspects of play are fully realized. Even though the default control system is the standard WASD mouse-and-keyboard setup used in almost every third-person game these days (you can also use a gamepad), the action is tempered with lots of role-playing touches. Energy points are used to dictate the availability of your attack options, so you can't repeatedly charge into the fray and slice up foes without a care for your stamina. Joan gains experience over time and levels up in various combo attacks, giving her even more choices when steel is bared. Eventually, she learns dozens of combination moves employed with a selection of nine trusty broadswords, the first with the catchy name of "The Sword of St. Catherine of Fierbois."

You can also develop Joan and her companions over time. Experience gained during battle provides points to boost the game's six core attributes--strength, defense, dexterity, leadership, hit points, and energy points--plus the various combo attacks, so you can custom-design your protagonist. Along with Joan, you can guide three other historical personages gradually introduced during the course of the campaign. Jean de Metz, the Duke of Alencon, and Etienne "La Hire" de Vignolles serve as her companions along the way. Each specializes in different weapons and has objectives to meet that are loosely associated with the main goal of freeing France from the English. Jean de Metz, for instance, wields the powerful Oriflamme sword and must slay the notorious de la Pole brothers. Alencon hopes to use his skill with poleaxes to reclaim his ancestral lands from the English Lord Bedford. And La Hire wages much the same struggle, albeit with a pike against an English nobleman named Talbot.

For King and Country

The game's action mode, from what we've seen, will likely be familiar to anyone who's played a fantasy-themed action adventure game, like EA Games' The Two Towers. Joan and her companions run from one objective to another, slay lots of enemies in melee and ranged combat (which uses a first-person targeting interface) for experience points, and manipulate inventory items. The earlier part of the game seems like a hack-and-slash role-playing game, right down to the apples, fish, and bread you eat to boost your hit and energy points. Crates can be smashed open to discover new weapons, arrows, and other helpful items, and slain enemies leave behind gold, which can be spent on new weaponry in city blacksmith shops.

Still, dedication to historical detail should separate Joan of Arc from stereotypical action adventures, which are always light on plot. This is because the game includes some surprisingly accurate historical details. From the very beginning of the campaign, Joan's actions are set against a backdrop of what was actually taking place in the English-occupied French countryside of 1429. All of the missions are based on historical events and feature enough information to give you an impromptu lesson in medieval French history. You aren't just given vague objectives; you're told the exact date, the current political situation, and the names and facts, which make your actions seem momentous.

And of course, there is also the game's strategic option. After Joan and her companions have established themselves, a series of nine large-scale battles let you step away from hand-to-hand combat and oversee armies. Historically, Joan's leadership skills were the main reason that the French nobility rallied behind her, and this fact is being emphasized by Enlight in major engagements that seem to play out similarly to the chaotic scenarios of a real-time strategy game. This aspect of play isn't as full-featured as the typical RTS, although Chan and the design team are giving players lots of tactical options with which to experiment.

For starters, the maps we've seen are both huge and representative of the actual French countryside. Forests, rivers, hills, and valleys are everywhere, and they have to be taken into consideration whenever you're planning a battle (even in melee combat, there are big advantages to be had if you properly use the terrain). Fail to secure the high ground, for example, and those infamous English archers will make you pay. Enemy castles are also a part of the landscape. Just as the real Joan oversaw a succession of sieges to remove the hated English from the fortresses that they had occupied, the game version of Joan is continually trying to bring down castle walls. She gains access to a number of siege weapons to aid in this pursuit, including the catapult, trebuchet, and battering ram.

At this point, the game seems to do a good job of accurately representing French geography. Hills and rivers look good, most scenes are topped with waving grass that nicely accentuates the rural setting, and the game also features a few interesting visual details, like the clouds of dirt that are stirred up by characters' boots. The character models seem fairly detailed, though their animations seem somewhat limited in the early version we played. Joan and her English opponents use a lot of the same maneuvers at this point, too. Everything flows together nicely, however, so you can get right into the combat and throw together impressive-looking combos with just a few mouse clicks. For the most part, audio doesn't seem to have been added yet. There is no dialogue in the preview build, and combat effects and music are rudimentary.

Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc is currently scheduled to ship on January 7. Check back with GameSpot for more coverage as the game nears completion.