Battle Wrath

Battle Wrath by Cerebral from 1997 — a name that rang no bells with my friends, but similar titles got lost by the dozens in the DOS game catalog of that era. 1997 was packed with action games trying to carve out attention between Quake and the rest of the world, and a large portion of them landed in the bottom drawer within two weeks.

It's an action game for DOS, and unfortunately that's pretty much where the description of its setting ends. Cerebral wasn't a developer whose name carried any weight as a quality guarantee back then. Battle Wrath falls into the category of games that hit the market in an era when CD-ROM made it possible for every minor studio to release anything — and many took that opportunity without much thought.

Action games from 1997 lived and died by their controls and pacing. Either you moved smoothly and shooting gave proper feedback, or you waded through molasses wondering who approved the project. Battle Wrath's placement on the market at that time suggests it was more the latter — games on the periphery of attention usually didn't have enough budget to get controls right before the gold master. But that's a hypothesis, not a verdict.

What's aged worst on games like this isn't the graphics or the OPL chip sound. It's the lack of identity. The big titles of that era I remember by one specific level, one sound, one moment. Games like Battle Wrath I remember — if at all — as a sum of feelings. You fired it up, played for a while, shut it down. The Sound Blaster hummed, the monitor flickered, and the next morning you went to school.

Playing it in a browser today makes sense for one specific group: people who want to map out the blind alleys of nineties PC gaming and understand why some names got forgotten. It won't be a nostalgic experience unless you played it back then — and even then you probably didn't play long. But this very layer of gaming history, the one without big names and without reviews in Level magazine back then, tells you more about that era than the actual hits.