Game: Brave Tales

Social games are more or less dominated by the hidden object, sim, and match-three genres, so it's nice when something other than those comes along. Brave Tales, the new fantasy RPG by Avallon Alliance and Renatus Media offers an unusual kind of gameplay (for casual games anyway) and great-looking graphics. Unfortunately, its potential is limited by its over-dependence on in-game purchases and an overall feeling of incompleteness.What's likely to draw you to Brave Tales in the first place is its artwork. The game's characters are extremely well-designed (its red-headed female archer calls to mind Merida from Pixar's Brave) and its backgrounds are worthy of an animated series. Its orchestral music adds to these exceptional visuals, and the three together create an impressively well-made sensory package. Within this beautiful atmosphere, you're asked to take control of a party of heroes whose goal—as heroes' goals usually are—is to traverse the land banishing evil and protecting the weak."Brave Tales is a role-playing game as well as a social game, and considering it's meant for a casual audience, has a surprisingly deep amount of role-playing gameplay. You start with three heroes: Arthur the warrior, Diana the archer, and Peter the healer, all three of whom have different skills (these are determined by which skill runes you equip) and use different weapons and armor. Down the line you encounter other characters with even more skills and gear, and the look of everyone can be changed if you're willing to spend gold on new skins.During battle, all of your heroes can be controlled individually, so you can move them and direct them to attack specific targets. Each of them has special attacks on cool-down timers that can be executed provided you have enough Mana, and each will auto-attack by default. One of the cool things about combat is that downed heroes can be resurrected as long as you have the gold to pay for it, so if you're this close to winning, one dead party member doesn't cause a frustrating loss.