PlayStation Basement #45 - Ballerburg: Castle Chaos

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on July 6th, 2019.

If you are in the United States, I’m sure you’ve heard fireworks during the last few days. We’ll be launching some things with today’s PlayStation Basement review of an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral. Let’s go!

Today’s game is Ballerburg: Castle Chaos. This game is a 3D reimagining of Eckhard Kruse’s 1987 artillery strategy game Ballerburg for the Atari ST. Because the original game was released into the public domain from the beginning, this 2001 version had no input from Kruse. The developers for this one were Ascaron Entertainment who also published the initial PC version in Europe in December 2001. Phoenix Games published the PlayStation version, also in Europe, in April 2003, and Mud Duck Productions published it in North America in December of the same year. Mud Duck is another budget publisher like A1 Games, publishing Cleopatra’s Fortune, Puzznic, Miracle Space Race, Qix Neo, Gubble, and other games that we’ll be taking a look at in the future. Right now, watch out for cannonballs and falling debris.

The cover art is the same in both regions except for some formatting differences. The image shows a cannon enshrouded in flames atop a castle turret as it fires off a few rounds. The color scheme works well with the medieval military theme. The image itself has a fairly nice look to it that reminds me of the cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate, but the composition is weak. The surrounding flames look cheesy and could have instead shown a view of the countryside of some sort.

Graphically, Ballerburg: Castle Chaos looks pretty good. Unlike the cover art, the game has a decent view of the countryside. Players can see their own castle and other buildings and those of the opponent. Buildings show damage as they are struck with boulders and shrapnel. Trees, hills, and water help fill in the map with the sun, moon, and stars overhead as time progresses through the battle. The cutscenes are a bit stilted, but I like the two comedic gunner characters and their designs. They pop up throughout the game to give little quips about what’s going on. Two main criticisms I have in regards to graphics are the simultaneously strange and generic character designs for the other characters, and how dark the game gets when the sun goes down. Even with these small issues, the game looks nice; I didn’t expect that for a budget game.

Ballerburg: Castle Chaos provides many explosive sounds to the player. Cannons, catapults, trebuchets, and more fire their payloads often, and incoming attacks strike your field with loud crashes and rumbles. I suggest turning the bass down on your sound system, or you might get a headache. The voice-acting ranges from total cheese to actual humor. The music is pretty good, fusing dramatic fanfares that might accompany a joust with the electronic beats of the 90s. It’s a neat design that works well. The game just continues to surprise.

Ballerburg: Castle Chaos amazed me with how fun the game was to play while still including a good bit of strategy. There’s a nice tutorial for new players that provides all you need to know to play the game. While players may think of real-time strategy as a PC experience, this medieval war simulator was cleverly mapped to the controller in an easy-to-use manner. Shoulder buttons open menus for building or controlling weapons, the D-pad moves a small cursor around your field for selecting where to build or repair, and the analog stick allows one to rotate their view about their own field. Interestingly, Ballerburg: Castle Chaos is one of a few games that utilizes the analog sticks in a more necessary manner. In addition to allowing rotation of the camera, the sticks also allow you to aim quickly with your weapons (the D-pad is the precise aiming). Again, this is a clever design that’s suited to the PlayStation very well.

Actually firing your weapons requires a bit of knowledge of how the game measures distances and how an opponent has laid out their base of operations. Initial shots at the opposition will be somewhat blind and will need to be adjusted based on where the previous shots landed. Successful shots will topple buildings and eventually the opponent’s palace. Buildings provide a player with money, weapon upgrades, magic spells, higher gold storage, and more. It’s crucial to protect buildings with walls and towers or lose income. Income is needed to fire weapons and finance repairs. Without it, you’re a sitting duck.

Ballerburg: Castle Chaos includes four single-player campaigns of increasing difficulty. Players serve the Forest Queen, the Desert Queen, the Ice Queen, or the Volcano Queen in a series of battle with the other queens. Some missions may require a player to protect an ally, destroy certain buildings of an opponent, or to topple the enemy’s palace within a number of minutes. The game also allows a player to setup different battles in the scenario mode or to fight a friend in the hotseat mode. The hotseat mode returns Ballerburg to its turn-based roots by only giving each player 30 seconds to make their moves before control switches to the other.

By the rocket’s red glare, Ballerburg: Castle Chaos is a good game. I wish that Ascaron would have offered Eckhard Kruse a bit more than some free copies of their game for all of his hard work on the original Ballerburg. I hope that he was at least able to enjoy playing this 3D version himself. With no expectations for quality going in to this, I was amazed with how well this game turned out.

Ballerburg: Castle Chaos receives a Good.

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