Monday, November 7, 2022

Cloud Monday - Brave: The Video Game - A Solid Game with a Solid Streaming Experience

In today's Cloud Monday, I'm playing Brave: The Videogame. It might be the first Disney movie tie-in videogame i've played since The Lion King and Aladdin on the Mega Drive. I have seen the movie and i do enjoy it, more so than Cars and Toy Story. But i knew nothing of the game before starting it.

I played through the tutorial and first "Level" of the game which was a little under an hour. I must admit i was surprised. it looks very much like a PS3 game when you start, and i admit it was what i expected from a game tie-in. But by the end, i was really enjoying myself and got far more immersed into the game than i expected. It's not the best game ever, but a solid 7 or 8 for sure and well worth trying out on via PlayStation Plus. Don't let the tie-in fool you either, it does well to tell it's story without needing the player to have seen/know the story of the movie.

But that's just from the first hour, or so, of the game so i really can't say if it holds true throughout. As for streaming, i found no issues playing this game via the PlayStation Plus Premium service. i found the controls responsive and the video quality stable and good. the only thing worth mentioning is that during the story cutscenes, which are uniquely made for this game and not pieces from the movie, there were many moments where macro blocking was evident. The problem is, without a disc copy of the game to compare with, i can't say for sure if it's due to streaming the game or rather due to video compression used for the game itself. If i were to guess, i'd say that it was already a part of the game, more so when there was no evidence of it happening during game play. One fine thing, the game does autosave which means we are somewhat at the mercy of it if we get the dreaded countdown to the stream being cut.