Reviewed: July 23, 2005
Reviewed by: John Bowlin

Publisher
Strategy First

Developer
Primal Software

Released: November 2, 2004
Genre: Action-RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature

4
6
4
4
4.4

System Requirements

It wasn't a good sign, however, when launching the game it minimized and popped up a little box saying I needed an Indeo codec driver. Seems to me if the game is going to require some kind of driver it should provide it with the install, but no, it didn't do that, and when I went to the driver web page they wanted $15 to buy the indeo driver. No thanks. I can live without whatever cut scenes are going to be shown with this. Fortunately I was able to get past that and actually get to the game menu and begin playing.

Here is what I of the Dragon promises to offer:

• Three playable dragons are available, each with its own inherent abilities.
• Explore the vast lands of Nimoan in 20 playable missions.
• More than sixty spells with breathtaking special effects.
• Over 40 unique monsters to fight and defeat.
• Build towns and help protect them.
• Terra morph landscapes: level mountain ranges, create earthquakes, volcanoes and craters.
• All models use skeletal animation for realistic animations.
• Twelve unique areas representing different landscape types.
• Hundreds of landscape items (trees, boulders, buildings, etc).

In theory the game supports mouse and keyboard as well as gamepad but I couldn't get the gamepad to work very well and there wasn't a lot of customization you could do for it. Since I have a duel-analog axis game pad you would think that I could have set up an x/y movement stick and maybe the other one for up and down, but no, the game doesn't support setting up a third axis.

At the start of the game you get a choice between three different dragons. One is a fire breathing dragon that has a potent breath weapon but isn't so hot with spells. Another is an ice dragon that is strong with magic, and the third is a black dragon that spits acid and can master the necromantic arts. The story doesn't seem to change depending on which one you take so it's just a matter of whether or not you want to use magic or stick with the breath weapons or not, basically. The fire dragon seems to be the easiest to play.

One pretty neat feature is the ability to swoop down, take a monster into your claws, and proceed to munch on it to regain your health. But after a while that gets somewhat old. One irritating thing about the game is that your attacks are so hard to control, it seems like it's really difficult to aim precisely and for someone who is accustomed to precision aiming in most action games, that was a real game breaker. Expect to miss a lot, especially at first. As you gain in levels this gets better but it is very frustrating when it happens.

The enemies all seem to have some kind of spit weapon that they can shoot very high into the air. Hmm imagine that, a game where you get to be a flying dragon but suddenly all the enemies act like anti-aircraft guns. Sure, you can try and fly around to avoid getting hit, but to actually attack and kill something you pretty much hover in one place and spit fire or acid at it until it dies. And whoever thought up the models for these monsters must have been watching too many Tim Burton flicks recently, because they go from weird to totally bizarre. They're unique, you can give them that, but at 30,000 feet, they all look the same. Just another little blip to blast to oblivion.

You would think that a dragon would be a graceful, beautiful, flying creature. The interface is so dire, however, that the flying part which should have been a great joy to the game, felt about as graceful as driving an 18-wheeler. For example, you can fly straight forward using the up-arrow, OR you can turn left or right using the left or right arrows. You can not hold down the forward arrow and a direction arrow to move forward and turn! I ended up just using the mouse and treating the game more like an RTS game than a flying simulation. Which is a real shame, because had the flight been more fluid, it could have really made the combats much more enjoyable and less of a click-fest.

You can gain new spells and abilities as you gain levels. Your breath gets more powerful, yada yada. Even this bare minimum of RPG trappings feels flat and boring, to go along with the extremely stale and uninteresting story. You got some weird dude flying on a flying carpet coming to give you orders. You, a frickin' dragon, taking orders from some flying carpet guy. Yeah right. And it's not even clear what you are supposed to do apart from flying around and killing everything in sight. Which gets kind of tiring, quickly. Sure, you're a powerful dragon, but it feels like you're some kind of janitor cleaning up area after area of endless streams of monsters.

The story isn't really compelling at all. To be honest I don't think I could tell you anything about it other than it involves some great evil wizard yada yada. If the story is supposed to be the driving narrative that holds the gameplay all together then it really doesn't do a very good job, because you really just don't care what happens.

Overall the graphics felt like a game that was about 4 or 5 years old. You've seen it all before. Low polygon counts (except for the dragons themselves), low-res textures for the environments and enemy critters. Muddy looking textures that are not crisp. Yeah, the game has a day and night cycle, but it doesn't appear to actually mean anything except that at night it's harder to see what's going on. The spell animations were also sort of been there, done that, along with the unimpressive "blobs of goo" that represent enemy attacks shooting all around you.

On the plus side, the game does support a bunch of different resolutions from 800x600 all the way up to 1600x1200, so if you have an LCD monitor that needs a specific resolution to be in native mode, the game probably can fit you perfectly. But even at the high resolutions, the graphics don't really appear all that stunning; they're just less grainy.

There's precious little in the way of ambient sounds. I couldn't even hear dragon wings flapping, and the pitiful sounding breath weapon attacks just didn't feel right for a game where you're this hulking big monster that flies. Even when munching down on monsters you don't hear much in the way of sound, apart from a few crunches like bones snapping, and some quiet squealing by the monster you're consuming.

Every time a blob of goo from an enemy hits you, no matter that this "goo" is supposed to be, it sounds exactly like the sound your fireballs make when they hit the enemy. A generic "explosion" bang, and that's just about it. In fact, I was starting to think that maybe sound just wasn't working right on my system. Overall the sound was very lacking in almost every way.

There is no multiplayer to extend the life, which is a shame because I can see where having dragons flying around attacking each other could have been a lot of fun. Unless you can find this title at a bargain price you're not getting a good value for your money here.

People who just really dig dragons might be able to endure the interface issues, but for most of the rest of us, this one should be passed up for better games.