Oh man, I of the Dragon is such a terrible game. I've only beaten it twice, and that's using godmode, because there is one mission that's so badly coded you literally cannot beat it without being immortal. The character you control in that level moves on the ground instead of flying, and they never actually coded the game for that, so you end up stuck inside objects or spinning in circles for 60% of the mission...
As for Dragon Commander, it's okay, but fell into the same trap as Ego Draconis... it was a little over-ambitious and a little under-achieving. It wanted to be a mixture of RTS, 3PS, and diplomacy simulator, and ended up doing each aspect kind of okay.
The RTS portion is stripped down and simple--you have a thing that generates resources which you place on pre-defined points on a small battle map, and then you just pump out masses of units. There are different kinds of units that are good against each other in a rock-paper-scissors fashion, but the RTS portion of the game moves so fast that it's really hard to rely on anything other than the cheapest, fastest ones you've got. The enemy will send immediate zerg rushes pretty much no matter the map or scenario, and due to how the campaign is structured, they're usually dug-in and defended while you're trying to push through and take the area, so they have far more to throw at you than you have to fight back.
The 3PS is part of the RTS, but at the same time not. You can command your units to attack or move to a certain point while in dragon form, but cannot order more of them produced, so you have to drop out of dragon shape regularly to replenish your army. Dragon shape is reasonably powerful, but since you outpace all your units you tend to end up a bullet sponge and have to fall back shortly after joining combat. The different dragons have slightly different stats, but it doesn't seem to make a huge difference overall, since dragon form is mostly just good for dealing with troublesome off-branching enemies that are going out of the path of your main army.
The diplomacy simulator parts are cute and have lots of good dialogue, but when it comes to actually interacting with the diplomats it's a little unsatisfying. Whenever a diplomat proposes a new idea, you have two choices--wholehearted accept or utterly reject. There's no mediation, compromising, deal-making, or any sort of middle ground whatsoever. As a result, you're pretty much required to polarize either one or the other group of races against you, as they divide loosely into two sides based on their morals. The Elves and Lizards are largely liberal, the Dwarves and Undead are largely conservative, and the Imps sort of fall in between. Even though characters themselves will sometimes mention good ideas for compromises on debates, they'll never be an option, which feels deeply unsatisfying when you're trying to play a good balanced leader rather than a one-sided tyrant.
All in all... it's fun, but I'm very glad I got it on sale on GOG rather than at full price, because Larian always seems to overreach their time or resources on game development.
And for the ninja: Spyro is perfectly respectable as a platformer, it's just I'm not good at platformers and have never been that attracted to the genre. Also, it annoyed me when the developers said they had absolutely no good reason for making Spyro not fly other than they didn't want to make the game that way. They didn't even take the handwavey out of "he was a baby," as they outright said he could always fly, from game 1, they just didn't let you.
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Topic: The "Recommend me a game" thread (Read 330826 times)