Not so Rawr – Dragon: The Game Review

Hiya, Phovos here, and today, I have a word of warning for you all.

The other day, I got a refund on a game. Actually, to be precise, I allowed a gift to be refunded by the person who bought the game for me. I’ve never felt the need to do that before, but I felt that poor SilverWolf had been ripped off of a good €17 worth of money. He could have bought Pohatu, Master of Stone, for that amount and both he and I would have had fun.

The game in question was Dragon: The Game. With a title like that, you’re already wondering whether it’s a good game or not. I’m telling you now, it isn’t.

I… I don’t even know where to begin with this game. Dragon: The Game looks absolutely awful. Both the standard Early Access Game and the Beta version. I don’t mean awful as in the way Minecraft looks awful for a modern game but has its own style, I mean genuinely awful. Horrible, glowing green landscapes scattered with stupidly bare trees, grey lumps as rocks, wooden lumps as houses, white spaghetti lumps that are supposed to be wolves and featureless humans. Your dragon, if you can call it a dragon, looks like an ankylosaur and a pterosaur had rough, angry sex after a hard night drinking. The most prominent feature is how there’s so much badly rendered fog, like a greyscale tint thrown over everything a few metres away from you. All I have left from the game is a single screenshot, because firstly the game refused to work with my recording software and secondly, I genuinely felt embarrassed showing you ‘gameplay’ from this mess.

There’s more though than just horrible graphics. The controls are awful and are non-functional when in windowed mode. The flight is pretty bad and often bugs out. The R button is supposed to roar but does nothing. The UI never works and I seem to be unable to even find how much health I have, let alone customize and upgrade my dragon. Aiming is nigh impossible. The physics make no sense and your dragon randomly bounces off things. There’s no eating animation. Enemies spaghettify if you grab them. The game lags so badly, no matter what you put the settings on, even though the landscape contains fuck all.

The biggest issue is that this game looks nothing like what is advertised on its Steam page. At least that advertised a world with some actual landscape on it. Wasn’t much, but was something. Dragon: The Game has gone completely backwards since then. We’re talking about a project that has been in Early Access for nearly two years now and has nothing to show for it. Nothing.

For the love of the Light, do not buy Dragon: The Game. It’s a waste of your money and your time. You want a decent dragon game? Play literally anything else. Dragonflight is an early access game with a lot of potential and amazing controls. Time of Dragons is a class-based dragon shooter game. TESV: Skyrim has the Dragonborn DLC and the mods Rideable Dragons and Burning Skies, which allow you to ride or be a Dov. If I’m honest? Even playing Pyro in Team Fortress 2 is a better dragon alternative to whatever the fuck this is supposed to be.

Okay, rant over. You have been warned.

This is Phovos on the SPUF of Legend, signing out.