Dragon Commander - Review Roundup #2

Couchpotato

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It's time for round number two of reviews for Dragon Commander, and most are positive with only one negative one.

Games Radar - 4/5

YOU'LL LOVE
  • Impactful decision-making in almost everything you do
  • Fun RTS battles and dragon combat
  • Charming characters, visuals, and in-game lore
YOU'LL HATE
  • Aerial controls make multitasking difficult
  • Not enough RPG elements
  • High learning curve
Hardcoregamer - 4/5

It’s a shame that so many people are opposed to the idea of a new-direction for the Divinity series. Even if its main story leaves much to be desired and some of its rules aren’t presented particularly well, Dragon Commander is a whole lot of fun. I urge everyone, even skeptical Divinity fans, to give Dragon Commander a shot — especially if they’re amused by the notion of a dragon wearing a jet pack.
Softpedia - 9/10

Divinity: Dragon Commander is a great title in what seems to become a good year for strategy games.

Every piece of the experience works as intended and the mix of grand strategy, tactical battles, card use and resource management creates a huge number of potential paths to success and almost infinite replayability.

The only real problem with Divinity: Dragon Commander is that it requires a bit of time to learn the most interesting and effective strategies and will then tie up even more of a gamer’s time with its obvious quality.

The version of Divinity: Dragon Commander I have played might differ slightly from the one that gamers get on launch, as the team at Larian Studios continue to improve the game experience.
And for last here is the negative one.

Only SP - 6/10

Overall I’m left rather disappointed by my experiences with this game. I really wanted to like it, as it’s one of the only RTS games I’ve seen recently, but the RTS element was so fundamentally flawed that I ended up just auto calculating almost the entire campaign. It was good for a single play through, but for the little amount of entertainment time that offers, the $40 price tag is rather steep. Dragon Commander definitely isn’t the genre reviving game I was hoping for.
More information.
 
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It was good for a single play through, but for the little amount of entertainment time that offers, the $40 price tag is rather steep.
Does anyone know what's the estimated play-time?
 
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I assume his play-time was especially short due to auto-calculating almost the entire campaign.
 
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Ive played it for al ittle bit now, and Im having a real hard time distinguishing between the different units. They are all so small, even if I zoom in. Loving all the other stuff though, and I'll get used to the RTS part soon I bet.
 
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Ive played it for al ittle bit now, and Im having a real hard time distinguishing between the different units. They are all so small, even if I zoom in. Loving all the other stuff though, and I'll get used to the RTS part soon I bet.
The trick is to zoom out so you get the icons appearing - they're much easier to distinguish (and select).
 
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The trick is to zoom out so you get the icons appearing - they're much easier to distinguish (and select).

Cool, thanks for the tip. Im getting more of a hang of it now. Battles are becoming harder and more frantic, and it's much more fun as well. Starting to love it now =)
 
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Autocalculating? What's that? A "cure" for lazyness?
 
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Autocalculating? What's that? A "cure" for lazyness?

Ït just means you can choose to resolve battles on the strategy map, just like in Total War. Convenient to avoid wasting time on very one-sided battles, e.g.
 
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Autocalculating? What's that? A "cure" for lazyness?
Actually it is. Basically if someone is to lazy or doesn't want to fight another battle the computer uses stats to determine who wins.

Update: Damn it you beat me to it GhanBuriGhan. I was to slow.;)
 
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It's also quite the time-saver :)

Obviously, joxer prefers to grind the mobs himself - as we all know :)
 
Autocalculating? What's that? A "cure" for lazyness?
You can only be in one place at a time, so you can only take control of one battle each round. The others you leave in the command of one of your generals or the generic 'imperial army', and they auto-resolve based on the forces arrayed against each other, the entrenchment of the defending side (if there is one), cards played by either side and a random element.

You don't have to take control of any battles, but if you do, you are limited to only one per round.
 
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You don't have to take control of any battles, but if you do, you are limited to only one per round.

I'm still not sure what was negative to that reviewer. The possibility to avoid micromanagement completely, or game disallowing you to control all battles per round.

I mean, stating something is "fundamentally flawed" is not really a detailed description that can explain what that thing is.
 
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I'm still not sure what was negative to that reviewer. The possibility to avoid micromanagement completely, or game disallowing you to control all battles per round.

I mean, stating something is "fundamentally flawed" is not really a detailed description that can explain what that thing is.

He does explain:

Michael White said:
The RTS side of the game didn’t feel right to me at all. There is very little construction, and everything is only able to be constructed on preset positions on the map.

This results in the main objective of the game being to rush the best points as soon as the match starts. After this initial race, the game transitions to a tug of war phase, where you and your enemy will charge each other over and over again until eventually someone wins. It’s not fun, and I am just glad that there is an auto calculate option for the battles in campaign mode.

For all the invective in the rest of his review (well, he is an angry teenager I guess, so that's probably allowed) the above strikes me as a fairly presented viewpoint, if not quite deserving of a 'fundamentally flawed' label, but as I say, set that in the context of the tone of the rest of the review.
 
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