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A Dungeons & Dragons based real time strategy game arrives. Liquid Entertainment and Atari’s Dragonshard proudly claims that it is the first D&D real-time strategy experience. The game maintains the roots of the genres well but offers enough new to make for a compelling experience.
Dragonshard is set in Dungeons & Dragons’ Eberron campaign. The game tells you the story of the potent McGuffin that three different factions—the Order of the Flame (representing the good guys), the Umbragen (an evil, underworld faction), and the Lizardfolk (who descended from mutated lizards—are trying to have it in their possession.
Dragonshard is really two different games that were pretty well combined. You have the surface portion of the game that is focused on real-time strategy gameplay and the underworld, which focuses on D&D-style role-playing. The surface portion of the game is pretty traditional but undoubtedly influenced by the Kohan series’ approach to base building, essentially having a limited number of bases and carefully deciding what you’re going to build in each one. This means you’ll have to decide whether you want a certain type of unit and how powerful you want them to be since you’ll need more buildings to get stronger units. To build an army, you’ll have to get a good number of captains that will automatically get soldiers. To get these captains, you’ll need points that you get from the underground. To construct these buildings you’ll need dragonshards (magic) and gold. You won’t have to gather either of these since dragonshards sporadically fall from the sky and gold replenishes itself.
In the underworld, you’ll be playing what seems to be a typical RPG. You’ll level up your characters, destroy enemies, collect loot, and complete some quests. The actions you do there affect the surface since you’ll be rewarded with points that will translate to a level up in the surface. You’ll need these points to recruit a good army as mentioned above. Like a typical D&D adventure, once you have a group, you’ll stick to that group instead of managing countless units like the typical real-time strategy game.
The singleplayer mode could have been longer though. There are only two campaigns despite the fact that the game has three factions. In addition, each campaign only has seven missions. Thankfully, multiplayer makes up for this. The typical multiplayer modes exist but they are given a little twist by the game. There are different ways to win including collecting all of the orbs, holding a base for a period of time and of course, wiping out the opposition. The game encourages building strong armies over time removing some cheap offenses at the beginning of the game.
The game’s visuals are very good. The 3D graphics are top-notch, really flexing the power of your videocard. The different areas look really well, with plenty of colors and detail in certain areas and a drab, dungeonesque look in others. The units look awesome as well. The developers really worked well with the D&D characters, effectively bringing them to life. Their character models and animation are top-notch.
The game’s sound is good but not as impressive. The background music is pretty solid though it doesn’t really add anything to the game. The voice acting is decent, though again, nothing out of the ordinary. The sound effects are good but a bit repetitive here and there.
D&D fans and RTS fans looking for something different should give Dragonshard. It is a very solid game overall with some nice tweaks and a good presentation. -- Michael Taylor, PGNx Media
---- Oct 22, 2005
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