Title: Dragon: The Game
Developer: Red Level Games Inc.
Publisher: Red Level Games Inc.
Release Date: November 7th, 2014
Game Engine: Unity
Number of Players: Single/Co-op
Genre: Action RPG
Ohhh for fuck sakes. I so wish I could do a video on this game (with a facecam). Because the look on my face is similar to a kid in a candy store.
Anyway. *claps his wings together* time to dig into this game and give the scoop.
So, in this game. The player can be.. a dragon. They can fly around. They can terrorize villages. They can sit on a pile of gold. And they can even breath fire. Pretty much all of your childhood(in my case.. adult) fantasies of wanting to be a dragon.
When launching the game, is a blurred screen and then the main menu. Don’t get the blurred screen.
On the Dragon button, the player can customize the colors of their dragon on the right. The player can also “create” their own dragon. Each ‘custom’-built dragon is based on their color. The current colors are Green, Red, Black, Blue, and White. There are also undiscovered dragons.
And me liking the color red so much, being a Red dragon means I am are the king of all the other dragons. Fucking hell, this game knows me so well.
The player can also name their dragon. I decided to name mine of the old nickname that was given to me on the MRT server: “Beenigh”. Which is ‘Benie’ in Draconic.
And so with Beenigh, I figured out the controls. Spacebar is for flapping the dragon’s wings (and staying in the air, I got to tap it twice). The player can divebomb by pointing your mouse cursor down. If they’re lucky, the player can pick up a helpless villager and take him with them, where the player can eat him if they wish.
After some time, I finally managed to get the mouse controls to behave correctly (horizontal controls, anyway). There are no mouse movement bars to fine tune the pitch and turn speed of my dragon.
One more thing about the controls, turning with my mouse was like.. well… a mount in an MMO game. It turned on a dime. And I’m pretty sure something that large, doesn’t have a 0 turning radius.
I think I’m ready to give my roaring review. And as much as I love dragons… this game, I do not like. However, it has great potential to be as epic as a dragon should be;
Good;
-Mmmmm…. “the player gets to fly as a dragon”.
Bad;
(due to the fact the devs clearly state that this game is an early Alpha(in my opinion.. not even that), I won’t go over the “wow, does this need work” bugs I found)
.
Final Verdict: I’ll be 100% honest with you. If you love dragons as much as I do, and you pray this small development company can deliver, then invest and enjoy the game as-is. But realize, it’s barely a game at the moment. Think of it as a hatched dragon whelp. Barely able to fly. It has to grow up first to be the fearsome beast it was born to be. Similar to the development of this game.
I give great praise to the devs for stating (in several places) that the game is nowhere near finished. Even more for still working on it instead of abandoning the project.
Also, the game sounds really promising (going by their ‘About This Game’ section on their store page. The way they talk, you’ll start off as a whelp and eventually grow up. The way you do, will affect the way you see the world. Will you be a kind, peacekeeping dragon (that’s hunted for having a bad rep)…, or will you be the one that caused the bad rep by murdering everyone you meet in cold blood (just because “FUCK you, I’m a DRAGON! :D”)?
Yet, I’m reminded that this has been an Alpha game since.. September 15th, 2014. It’s been over a year, and it still looks like this. Yet, this is where you really got to calm down and learn that game development can take a REALLY long time.
I’m hoping my $15 investment that I paid for this (instead of the $18 they normally ask for) helps to fund their development. I would like to know how big their development/art team is. Going by the fact it’s taken this long, I’d guess about… 5 developers and 2 artists?