Game review: Free online – MyBrute.com

MyBrute is a cute and clever ‘game’ site that allows you to create and battle a little ‘Brute’ with those of others folks. You start by creating your Brute – choosing the name/gender and selecting the look/color options from a random generator are the only customization features. Your Brute has three attributes defining his/her prowess in the Arena where all the battles occur – these are Strength, Agility, and Speed. This is rounded out by Endurance, a measure of your Brute’s health.

Your Brute’s abilities to be victorious in the Arena come down to his/her weapons and skills. You’ll start with a few, but as you battle and gain levels, you gather more and more of the powerful improvements. Some of the weapons are more handy than others – there are the ever-powerful Club, Sword, and Mace, while the Fan, Racket, and Staff are not as highly sought after. Some weapon types have advantages over others – while the Club deals high damage, it’s easy to dodge, and the knife with its relatively low damage can deliver two or three blows per attack.

This is my Brute Lycantor

Along with weapons, your Brute’s ability to stay competitive (at least with equal-level Brutes) usually comes down to skills, categorized into two groups. The ‘super’ skills are rare but powerful, however the right combination of standard skills can be quite effective. A few of these include Sabotage (removes one of an opponent’s weapons per successful attack), Thief (steals an opponent’s active weapon), and Bomb (one-time-use ranged attack). With leveling, your Brute also earns attribute points, Endurance, and occasionally a pet. Pets are not only handy for providing extra attacks against your enemy, but they can also absorb the damage that would normally be targeted at you. The three kinds of pets include a simple but weak dog (of which you can get multiples), a stronger and fast-attacking wolf, and a powerful, but rare beast.

“How do I level my Brute?” you ask. Simple: Arena battles. Your Brute can have up to three battles per day. You choose from randomly-selected opponents of equal level, or you can search a Brute of your choosing if you know his/her name. The battles are cute, but there is no strategy involved. Your Brute uses his/her weapons and skills, counter-attacks, blocks and dodges, of their own volition. All you can do is hope for the best. Depending of the match-up, the sequence of skills and weapons used, and luck, the outcome varies. The fights you choose (of equal level) net you two experience points for winning or one for losing. Other players who choose to battle your Brute don’t affect your win total or experience at all. Each subsequent level is of course a bit harder to attain than the one before.

An Arena battle in MyBrute

The other method of attaining experience is by recruiting pupils. Anyone who creates a Brute through a link to your cell (home) becomes a pupil of your Brute. When a new Brute is created or levels, his/her master (your Brute) gains experience. Of course, as with anything ‘exploitable’, this has led to a group of players who have found a way to manipulate/automate this to create elite Brutes in no time flat. Here the comparison: An average Brute who battles three times a day and wins approximately 50% of the time should reach level 11 in about two months with an average of 90 wins. These ‘hacked’ Brutes are close to level 200 already and often only have 60-70 wins. Their trick: They have tens of thousands of pupils, which you can tell are created automatically with a script based on their meaningless names (i.e. ‘fheubaks’). There are tournaments every few days, but all Brutes are welcome and these cheating elites always wins so what’s the point?

All in all, MyBrute is a fun distraction, at least for a five-minute daily interlude. It’s entertaining to see your Brute defeat the other players’ and hope for the better-than-average skill or weapon as a reward when leveling. Ignoring the cheaters by avoiding the tournaments is advised – it seems the site’s owners aren’t doing anything to remove or prevent this activity. I invite you to sign up and create your own Brute – all you need to provide is a unique name for him/her and a password – not even an email is required. Join MyBrute (and become Lycantor’s pupil). Enjoy!

UPDATE (9/22/09) – Basic strategies and time-savers:

Here are some helpful hints to help your Brute along: First of all, choose your opponents whose attributes somewhat align with your Brute’s. If you have a high Agility, but relatively low Strength, pick a combatant which somewhat similar scores. This will give you a better chance of an even, and therefore winnable match. You can get the name of the available enemies and visit their cell to see if they have a battle-changing extra (like a bad-ass skill, the beast-pet, or a devastating weapon), but this is probably overkill. You get one extra experience point for winning versus losing so don’t overdo it. Be sure to battle Brutes of equal level (these are the ones that the matching page will automatically present to choose from). If you battle someone of a lower level, you will only get one experience point, even for a win.

Secondly, once you’ve battled a couple of hundred Brutes (over time), it’s not really exciting to see how every fight plays out, especially if you have multiple Brutes (like a main and a couple pupils for him/her). You can bypass watching the battles play out with this trick: When the face-off screen is ready and you go to click ‘Start Fight’, click it fast four to five times. This will immediately return you to your cell with the battle complete. You then can see if you’ve won or lost and if you want click the result to watch the battle replay. You can cut down the time to takes to cycle your Brutes’ fights tremendously with this trick. Enjoy!