Video Game / Bravium

Our Heroes, alone against the hordes of evil

Bravium is a Hero Defense videogame for PC and Android, downloadable for free and developed by In Game.

The game itself is pretty straight-forward: you play as a massive viking swordsman (and later a mysterious sorceress), fighting your way through a series of levels where he/she has to defeat a horde of monstrous enemies of various skills, as well as destroying the two towers present on each level. Destroying the towers net and surviving the stage net you a star, which can be used to purchase skills that improve the heroes' skills. Completing optional objectives or levels will reward you by unlocking new skills, weapons and trinkets, vastily improving your arsenal of weapons and spells, allowing you to face the enemies in many different ways, mixing and matching weapons and spells to lay waste on the foes.

The plot is rather simple: the awakening of a monstrous Dragon in a remote, god-forsaken land has stirred hordes of monsters, which are threatening the villages, as mysterious "towers" are plagueing the landscape. The heroic Barbarian sets sail with his magic Drakkar, gathering a small following of companions, including the Wizard, and a veritable arsenal of spells, weapons and amulets in order to destroy these hordes of monsters and become true heroes.

---

Bravium contains examples of:

• Achievements in Ignorance: How the Barbarian came to own a flying Drakkar? According to the comic strips, it used to be a normal longboat when one day, while he was napping, it sailed down a river to a waterfall. After all the other barbarians run away after trying in vain to awaken their chieftain, the drakkar reached the waterfall's rim... and kept sailing onward, in spite of gravity. Even the Barbarian looked confused.
• Achilles' Heel: The last Forest level boss has a high defense, but it will drop drastically after perfoming his lounging tongue attack.
• Action Girl: The Wizard can fight as well as the Barbarian even with the bigger, more melee-oriented weapon (though she fares better with sorcery).
• Advancing Boss of Doom: Certain bosses or minibosses have highly-damaging attacks that you can avoid by moving backward, but since they advance costantly, sooner or later you'll run out of space.
• Airborne Mook: Mosquitoes and Bats. The former tend to be fast, annoying Fragile Speedster enemies, the latter are slower and usually have a special gimmick.
• All There in the Manual: Until a recent patch allowed the player to read the "story" (through a series of humorous comic strips) and the "bestiary" (containing informations on all the enemy monsters encountered, as well as a silly flavour text. Subverted in the final levels, where some plot is provided through dialogues between levels.
• And the Adventure Continues: After killing Cerberus and putting an end to the demonic invasion, it's implied that the Barbarian will still venture deeper into the Firelands beyond the Bonelands to achieve his goals.
• Anti-Armor: Axes can break armor, which allows you to deal more damage for a short while.
• Anti-Frustration Features: You can't beat a level or a boss? Don't worry, once every eight hours you can open a free chest that allows you to obtain a free Star and healing potions. Furthermore, once you unlock a new area, you'll start to obtain better potions and items from the chests you can open.
• Attack Backfire: Certain Rune Combo will give you an enchanted shield which respond to enemy attacks with powerful bursts of magic. Also, the Thorn Shield and the Fear Shield have a chance of hitting back the enemies upon being hit.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Giants and Bosses tend to be humongous, getting larger and larger as you progress. The Final Boss and the one in the beginning take the cake.
• The Atoner: It's revealed by the Cabbage Lass that the Cabbage Prince she's holding and representing was once ruler of the Cabbage Kingdom, whose nonchalance and bad government turned the once fertile Boneland into a land of death and despair, committed atrocities and opened the gates to Hell, though now he's indirectly helping the heroes stop the invading forces of Dragon, led by Cerberus, and even tell them how to kill him.
• Barrier Warrior: The Barbarian can summon a spherical barrier which halvens damage and replenish Mana.
• Bat Out of Hell: Giant bats are among the encountered enemies. Cave Bats can push you back with a powerful scream, Mountain Bats have a poisonous breath but release healing hearts when killed and Vampire Bats are tougher, hit harder, can replenish their life points but are slower.
• Battle Cry: The Barbarian can unleash a powerful scream that hits multiple enemies for minor damage, slows them down and makes them more vulnerable.
• Boss Banter: Cerberus does this to your heroes across the Bonelands between levels.
• Bewitched Amphibians: The Wizard's last level 3 spell, Rain of Toads, summons a veritable rain of the titular amphibians that not only deal damage to enemies, but can also debuff or poison them over a short time.
• BFG: The Yellow Rune + Iron Rune combo nets your character a massive, highly-decorated cannon to shoot at your enemies. While it's slow and short-ranged, it can push back hit enemies and deals a lot of damage.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant mosquitoes appear as enemies. They're hard to hit, and the frozen one can deal unexpected One-Hit Kill attacks.
• Body Horror: Some of the monsters are grotesque. The Beast hides a large, jawless mouth with an overly-long tongue covered in barbs and hooks, while both Cave Trogs and Warriors and Shamans have eyeless faces.
• Boss Rush: Raid Mode, on higher levels, will often pit you against previous bosses and minibosses along with many other common enemies, more often than not in humongous numbers.
• Breakable Weapons: Each weapon, even missile ones, have a limited amount of shots before they break. Once they do, they force you to use a broken mess of a stump at melee range. One of the unlockable power ups improves the weapons' hardness.
• Breath Weapon: Frost Giants and Fire Giants attack with icy/fiery, high-damaging breaths. Sharky has a blizzard one which is a One-Hit Kill.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: According to the comic strips, the Barbarian is quite a goofball outside of combat.
• Combat Tentacles: The Kraken Shield can summon a tentacle that damages nearby enemies.
• Cool Ship: The Barbarian's flying Drakkar, which is also the base of operation for the heroes.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Magical runes, which you can combine: Red for the Life Runes, Blue for the Mana Runes, Green for the Poison Runes, Light Gray for the Diamond Runes, Yellow for the Power Runes, Black for the Iron Runes,White for the Frost Runes and Brown for Death Runes. Mixing and matching the runes can give life to powerful, if short, power ups.
  • In certain scenarios of the Bonelands, Red Souls will deal massive damage to you, while Blue Souls can, if you touch them, attack the enemies, which is exactly how you defeat the Final Boss.
• Crystal Weapon: Many of the usuable weapons, including the Crystal Sword, the Emerald Sword and the Emerald Axe. They're usually more brittle and easier to break, but grant bonuses of various kind, usually magical in nature.
• Death from Above: Both some of the heroes' most dangerous spells (Meteor and Storm) as well as many of the enemies' special abilities. Shamans can rain down powerful spells from above, while the Cave Boss can summong falling rocks. Cave Archers can shoot at the ceiling, which drops something heavy on you. The miniboss from the bonus level "Circle of Bones" is a fiery mosquito who, before actually appearing onscreen, delivers pain in the form of nigh unavoidable flaming meteors as it flies over the arena, several times in a row, before descending to face the player fair and square, and this after a whole level of hard-hitting mooks.
• Degraded Boss: The very first boss is a Giant-like boss called "Ironhand". Other giants appear later as common mobs. The same goes for the second boss, the Crane, who goes on to become a common nuisance in the Bonelands as the nearly-identical Bone Walkers.
• Delayed Reaction: The Doom Axe can randomly curse enemies with a timer: once the timer is empty, they suffer damage equal to your current Mana Maximum score, which usually kills all normal enemies on the spot.
• The Dragon: According to the Blacksmith, Cerberus is the main lieutenant of Dragon, and defeating him in the Bonelands will stop the invasion. As of know, he's also the Final Boss.
• Dragons Are Demonic: The Final Boss is an eldritch-looking "Dragon" commanding a horde of monsters. Cerberus, the boss of the Bonelands, fits the bill as well, being a massive, three-headed wyrm living in a place resembling the land of the dead.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: Applies to most of the weapons you can obtain, especially the ones obtained by the Iron Runes.
• Evil Is Easy: Certain bosses and minibosses are plain cheap in terms of abilities, usually possessing One-Hit Kill attacks that they can unleash, sometimes multiple times in a row, such as:
  • Turtle (falling rocks that stun and deal absurd damage, but easy to avoid if you can move back).
  • Sharky (a sure-kill blizzard that covers the entire screen and can only be survived if you have a way to make yourself invincible).
  • Bomber Mosquito (who, before actually being fightable, bombards the entire screen multiple times with explosive and deadly meteors which will kill you eventually if you're not obscenely powered up, lucky or have an invulnerability combo ready) or the Red Ghost (Unlike common ghosts, he's immune to both weapons and physical damage).
  • Cerberus (Not only he takes Scratch Damage from magic and weapons, he's also costantly summoning the highly-damaging souls of Hell which can one-shot your life meter or mana meter, and he hits like a train).
• Evil Old Folks: The second boss is Crane, an elderly-looking Trogg walking on long stilts replacing his limbs and tossing potions at you.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The first time you play, you're in control of an overpowered Barbarian marching towards the Dragon's Castle, about to face the Dragon's servant itself... only to be unceremoniously defeated... then the narrator realizes that you're a newbie and decides to start the adventure all over from the beginning...
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The three main form of elemental damage, as well as Poison. Normally, the Wizard mostly employs Fire and Ice, the Barbarian Lightning and both have a poison-themed skill. A special Achievement for both classes in the Bonelands will allow them to learn a technique of the missing element (the Barbarian can learn an ice-based Skill, the Wizard learns a powerful Lightning spell).
• Friendly Fire: The good thing about the Shaman or the Medusae, is that their special attacks can damage even other monsters. There's even an achievement for having enough enemies killed by a Shaman's spell. The Bone Rider's Ground Pound explicitly damages the "thing closest to them", which means he can as well damage his own allies if you push back quickly enough.
• Full-Boar Action: The barbarian spell "Warhog" summons a single, fierce boar who proceed to damage, stun and knock enemies back in a line.
• Gainax Ending: Upon defeating Cerberus' the Dragon's lieutenant, he dies, claiming that there's no Dragon, and then the Cabbage Lass claims that thanks to your victory, the monster invasion is stopped. Then, the Barbarian witness several blue souls (like the ones who helped him against Cerberus), ascend to heaven... along with himself and the Wizard, leaving him pretty confused. The extra level beyond implies, however, that the Barbarian's adventure is far from over.
• Game Face: The Barbarian, (who, in base form sports nothing but a toothy grin and a beard), gains a more savage look when using the Berserker form.
• Ghibli Hills: The first part of the Forest is implied to be near the starting Village where you recruit all the crew.
• Giant Mook: Giants are rare, slow and healthy, and can deal tons of damage per hit when they attack.
• Harmless Freezing: Combining the Ice Rune with either the Life Rune or the Magic Rune encases the player in an icy coffin which protects him from all damage and makes him invulnerable (but immobile) for a while.
• Healing Factor: Your characters can slowly regenerate health, a trait that you can boost either by powering up the Regeneration skill or by backing if you're wearing a shield. Other trinkets can increase your health regeneration, such as Mushrooms, the explosions from Cave Jellies and the hearts collected from the dying Snow Bats.
• Helpful Mook: Certain enemies can benefit you: Cave Jellies' death blast gives you a regeneration bonus if you survive it, Snow Bats leave behind healing hearts when killed, while Snow Trogs will sometimes puke out an orb which increases your mana and Skill Damage.
• Heroic Mime: The Barbarian doesn't speak beyond grunts, growls and battle cries. The Wizard can sometimes shout the names of her spells in simlish and let out a chuckle upon surviving the current stage.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The encounter with the Worm in the New Game level is seemingly this, and as the Barbarian dies, the narrator backsteps a little to explain the events that lead to the battle and starts the game proper. Subverted, it is possible to kill the Worm, thus unlocking the first secred achievement, but it's not easy.
• Horny Vikings: The Barbarian plays this as straight as possible.
• An Ice Person: The Wizard can cast ice-based spells, including Freeze, Blizzard and Ice Armor. Snow Shamans can conjure a deadly snow meteor from above, while the Ice Runes can add icy effects to other combo (Including an icy shield, a series of falling snow bullets and a hail of razor-sharp ice fragments).
• Improbable Weapon User: The Champion miniboss is a Wolf Rider in a fancy red armor brandishing a solid gold trophy that has a chance of stunning you silly for a while.
• In the Hood: The Wizard wears a pointy red hood obscuring most of her face.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The weapons obtained by the Iron Runes are incredibly powerful and strong, but only lasts for a while. The weapon type depends on the other rune (E.g Life and Iron gets you a Two-Handed Sword, while Ice and Iron gets you a Hammer and Shield).
  • Occasionally you can draw a Legendary Card which allows you to enter into possession of a super-rare and usually quite powerful weapon/shield (powerful in terms of both bonuses and damage output)
• Kamehame Hadoken: Combining the Yellow Rune with either the Life Rune or the Mana Rune results in a powerful, screen-clearing wave of raw energy that can wipe out all enemies onscreen.
• Magic Knight: Technically, both the Barbarian and the Wizard qualify, for their skills in weaponry and magic.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": In story comics, a small army of Trogs and Warriors led by Ironhand do this when they realize that the Wizard's hut is filled with explosives, and she's outside, about to light the wick.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Sharky, the boss of the Snow Area is a hybrid of Orca Whale and Bear, with six legs and the ability to summon deadly blizzards at random.
• Mooks: Trogs are goblin-like feral monsters who are encountered almost always in groups and are the main enemies of the game.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Warriors carry swords and shields and wield though armor. They're very resistant to physical damage, but vulnerable to magic. Depending on their breed they can carry different weapons (Swords, clubs, axes, hammers, whaling harpoons, totems) and have different special skills.
• King Mook: Usually, bonus stages you can unlock ends in a combat against a unique, stronger-than usual enemy with special skills. Including the Mosquito Cultist for Trogs, the Smith for Warriors, Snowman for Mountain Giants and so on.
• Mook Maker: Fur Jellies do not attack directly, but they can summon Jaws to attack for them.
• Mordor: The Boneland, the final area of the game, is a putrid wasteland of death and decay. This is where Cerberus lives.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Enemies tend to have gaping mouths with lots of sharp, half-rotten teeth.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Cabbages! Cabbages in this univers are obtained from defeating the monsters, and allows you to forge items of power and potions from scratch. Deconstructing magical items net you colored cabbages you can use to forge new items. According to one strip, they're actually used to revive the heroes! And they once ruled a whole kingdom, until their apathy and mismanagement turned everything into a hellish landscape and gave birth to a series of events leading to the current monster invasion.
• Mundane Utility: The strips shows the Barbarian using his newfound powers over electricity to give himself a spiky, cooler moustache.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: The Wizard can carry and use the same heavy weaponry as the Barbarian, but, in a slight subversion, her movements are slower when using the Two-Handed Weapons.
• Mushroom Samba: Played for laughs in the comics where the Barbarian eats a mushroom (a regenerating item in game) and starts beating the crap out of everything and even fly, grow to gigantic size and shoot laser beams... except that the last panel shows that he's just having a bad trip and he's still where he was when he ate the mushroom.
• Nintendo Hard: As the game progresses, towers, monsters and bonus levels grow more and more difficult, pretty much forcing the player to learn quickly about how and when to use items, weapons and skills taking notes of the cooldown, aoe and damage, as well as memorizing the enemies' skills in order to deal with them correctly. Neglect to power up or increase your skills is suicidal, and level grinding is required to get all three stars.
• No Name Given: Except for the common enemies, the heroes aren't named: the Barbarian, the Wizard, the Cabbage Lass, the Dwarf... Bosses and minibosses tend to have self-explicative names (The Smith, Crane, The Beast, Turtle, Sharky etc etc).
• No Ontological Inertia: Killing off an enemy will automatically interrupt each and every attack he was casting, even if it was about to crash on you. Looks odd to see a barrage of primordial, fanged darkness disappear into thin air as it's about to fall on you when you murder the shaman who cast it.
• No-Sell: While bosses have Contractual Boss Immunity to certain status, your hero can temporarly become invincible by combining the Life Rune with the Diamond Rune.
  • Ghosts are completely immune to weapon damage and can make other monsters more resistant against magic. Their King Mook, the Red Ghost, is immune even to magic damage, though thankfully only to the extent of taking Scratch Damage from attacks, and can accidentally lower his own defenses with one of his attacks.
• Oddly Shaped Sword: Some blades, such as the Void Blade or the axe-like sword obtainable in the Bonelands' bonus objective.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Lampshaded for the Cave Rider's weapon of choice: "How they can even wield that thing with one hand?"
• One-Hit Kill: What makes Sharky so difficult to deal with: halfway through he will rear, puke some empowering spheres and then blast the entire screen with a killer blizzard that automatically kills the hero, no matter how armored. Your only chance is either killing Sharky before he does that or using some form of invulnerability (The Life+Diamond Rune Combo).
• One-Hit Polykill: Certain types of crossbows can shoot through multiple enemies at once. The Grim Wand can, occasionally, shot a piercing bolt of energy.
• One-Man Army: Given the type of game, both the Barbarian and the Wizard are more than capable of wiping out huge amounts of enemies to proceed.
• Overly-Long Tongue: The Beast has a special attack where it open its arms and thrust its overly long, barbed tongue at you, dealing massive damage and poisoning. Too bad for him, it also expose its weak spot.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The boss of the Bonelands is a massive, traditional three-headed wingless dragon named Cerberus, who's actually a lieutenant to the more formidable Dragon and gatekeeper of Hell.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Bone Trogs will leave behind a vengeful wrath that tries to curse the player, dealing severe damage over time before vanishing. A suicidal bonus objective requires letting at least 100 of these ghosts hit you... unfortunately you have to survive them, fortunately not all at once. Later you can meet actual Ghosts who are completely immune to physical damage, forcing you to rely on magic to defeat them.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Giants in this game resembles oversized, gorilla-like Trogs with massive bulks and incredible strength that walk on all four. Snow Giants can breath highly-damaging streams of ice from the mouth.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Pretty much everything you face, mostly humanoid enemies such as the Trogs (feral goblin-like creatures), to Jaws (tiny, fanged mouths on legs), grotesque, faceless shamans and that's without getting into the bosses.
• Personal Space Invader: Jaws and sometimes Ghosts will perform a lunging attack to get right into your face. Luckily, this sometimes makes them easier to hit with a magic or attack with the right timing.
• Playing with Fire: The Wizard's main spells are based around fire: fireballs, fire-spitting familiars and the deadly, crowd-hitting Meteor.
• Point Build System: Completing levels grants you Stars, up to three (one for surviving, plus one for each destroyed tower). Stars are used to increase your skills and power you up. Of course, the higher a skill is, the more stars (and time) you'll need to power it up.
• Puzzle Boss: The Red Ghost: Normally nearly-invulnerable to mundane and magical damage, his defences drops considerably once he succesfully uses his "Life Stealing" attack on your character.
  • Final Boss (so far) Cerberus is as invulnerable as the Red Ghost, but if you walk in the floating blue souls that appear through the stage as he appears, they'll fly towards him, damaging him.
• Rain of Arrows: The Totem Archer Miniboss will occasionally shoot a fiery arrow near the hero: a few seconds later, a veritable stream of arrows from an hidden backup will rain down on the spot, dealing humongous amounts of damage.
• Savage Wolves: Wolves are commonly encountered as enemies who can use buffs or debuffs by howling. There are also Wolf Riders.
• Shock and Awe: The Barbarian can either summon a single lightning bolt or a much more devastating Storm. Later on, the Wizard gains access to a lighting-based spell.
• Shout-Out: The first type of tower you run across in the Mordor-like Bonelands? A black pillar with a fiery, scrying eye on it.
  • One of the strips has the Barbarian drawing a crude bird on a cabbage and throw it with a slingshot at some Trogs clustered on a tree.
• Sinister Scythe: Wolf Riders carry large scythes, that can slow down your attacks if they connect.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Snowlands, a land of icy ruins and snowy passages with frozen towers and slippery ground.
• Summon Magic: The Wizard can summon her fox-like Familiar to bombard enemies with fireballs. The Barbarian's skill Spit summons an ethereal cobra which then spits a glob of deadly venom on the ground, forming a bubbling pool that deals damage to all enemies stepping it, as well as Warhog, which summons a ferocious boar who bullrush enemies, damaging them and knocking them back.
• Super Mode: The Berserker mode turns the Viking into a red-skinned Screaming Warrior with increased fighting speed and damage that tears most enemies to shreds. The Wizard can don an icy armor that boosts her defense and regeneration before blowing up after some time, freezing close enemies. Completing a bonus objective in the Bonelands gives the Barbarian the frost-themed Frost King, which allows him to deal additional Frost Damage and gives him a powerful armor proportional to his current Mana score, which can make him potentially nigh-invulnerable for a while and turns him into a literal Mighty Glacier.
• Taking You with Me: Jellies will explode upon death, damaging everyone nearby. Cave Jellies however heals enemies hit by the blast, if they survive. Bone Trogs will release their highly-damaging ghost at you.
• A Taste of Power: The first time you play, you're in charge of a souped-up Barbarian capable of killing pretty much everything in his way... until the Worm at the castle gates, that's it... and even then you can, if you're persistent, kill it and get a secret achievement.
• Technicolor Blade: Applies to most of the weapons made from unusual materials (e.g. the Emerald Axe and the Crystal Sword)
• Technicolor Toxin: In this case, green venom from both enemies and heroes.
• Top-Heavy Guy: The Barbarian has humongous shoulders paired with small legs and hips.
• Underground Monkey: Each area has variations of the various enemies you encounter, though it's kinda subverted, since each enemy has unique skills and gimmicks.
• Use Your Head: The Barbarian's first skill is a stunning headbutt which inflicts lots of damage to the closest enemy, stunning him for a short while.
• Waiting Puzzle: Waiting in the seemingly useless level Shores of Hell for around 10 minutes or more, you can actually engange in another horde of enemies and finally access to the second secret achievement.
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • Two-Handed Swords: The Barbarian's starting weapon, large swords ranging from claymores, to katana to zweihanders, they can hit multiple enemies.
  • Swords and Board: You can repair yourself behind the shield to reduce damage and regenerate health/mana quicker. Swords deal less damage but are quite fast, and some of the shields have special powers.
  • Wands: The Wizard's starting weapon, Wands can attack from far away but consumes a little mana with each strike.
  • Crossbows: Long-range weapons that can hit from far away, sometime twice in a row and with piercing bolts. They have a limited amount of shots before needing reloading.
  • Axe and Shield and Two Handed Axes: Axes are slower than swords, but deal more damage and have a chance to lower the enemy defense, making them even more vulnerable to damage.
  • Mace and Shield: Found later in games, they're slow but powerful and have a chance of stunning enemies, as well as having special powers.
• Women Are Wiser: In the comic strips, the Wizard and the Cabbage Lass are definetively more sensible and down-to-earth than the obtuse, manchild Barbarian.
• Wrecked Weapon: If your weapon breaks, you can still fight with the shattered stump, though of course it's pitifully weak. Shields never break.
• Zerg Rush: Certain stages will unleash a veritable stream of enemies at you at once, especially Wolves, Jaws and Trogs.