Dragonshard

"D&D + Real-Time Strategy? Sounds great, right? Too bad it's made by Atari."

-Summary-

If you are a fan of either GOOD D&D or GOOD RTS games, DON'T GET THIS GAME. It's neither.

-End Summary-

-Detailed review-

When I first bought it, I thought it was going to be an amazing game. D&D brought into a world in which you can build armies and go to war. It fell FAR short of those expectations. In fact, it fell pretty short of the standards I would hold for any decent RTS game in general.

~~The D&D Aspect: 1/10
You can really tell that this game was made by people who have likely never played such D&D greats as the Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate serieses, and it's doubtful that they've ever looked very much into D&D at all. D&D is designed to be realistic fantasy, meaning that the magic, creatures, and ect all look and feel exactly as they would if they were real. This game ignores that standard, choosing instead to make most units and other various things in the game look laughably cartoonish, and (in my opinion) completely stupid. The loading screen(s) even add a bunch of unnecessary gears and screws and such that really add nothing to the game at all. If anyting, they detract from it and make it even harder to take seriously. It goes for just about every fantasy cliche there ever was, even if it has never been a part of the D&D world at all. The only thing it leaves out is halflings, which, in a D&D game, actually *are* supposed to be there.

You'd think this game would run on a D&D dice-based system, right? There is no evidence whatsoever that this happens, from what can be seen by playing the game normally. No saving throws, no To Hit, no AC, but just some faked system meant to look almost like real D&D to someone who isn't looking very hard at all. I don't know what system they did use, but guessing from the general appearance of the game, it's based loosely on Warcraft.

~~The RTS Aspect: 5/10
It's about middle-range in terms of RTS quality, but that's not saying much at all. It's among the ranks of all the other not-really-very-good RTS games that only series fans actually play. It's also glitchy and occasionally closes itself randomly for almost no reason at all, even on computers that can more than support it.

The building system mimics that of Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. You get construction nodes and build a set number of buildings around those. The unit and soldier system is nearly unique, as far as I can tell, but just because it's unique doesn't mean it's good. You can build captains at your main buildings, which you can upgrade using your EXP (you get it for killing stuff), which thus upgrade the captains and allow them to have more soldiers under their command, as well as give them new special abilities. The problem? Your population cap (how many captains you can have) is directly related to the number of construction buildings you have created, allowing you to, throughout most of a battle on a single map, have little more than 20-ish captains in play at any one moment.

The maps on which you play are very, very tiny compared to most other RTS games, and the game attempts to compensate for this by having an annoyingly-zoomed-in camera that you can only angle (you can't widen its viewing area at all), and when combined with the fairly large units, it makes it hard to command your full army, assuming that you want to quickly select more than ten or so captains in your conquest.

As for special abilities, these sound very good in theory, but in reality, most of them are pretty pointless. The AI almost never uses any of their own special abilities, other than clerics automatically healing. Basically, to get anything accomplished with your spellcasters besides low auto-attacking damage, you have to click on each of them individually (or, to select lots of the same unit type, double-click... unfortunately this feature doesn't always work as it should), select their power, and select their target. Tedious, and not very useful during combat, as there is no way I've seen to pause and issue commands, therefore your units will be constantly fighting, killing, and dieing as you try to get your couple sorcerors to toss a fireball.

It had the potential to be a great RTS, but... well, it just wasn't.

-Final Thoughts-

The developers, basically, COMPLETELY missed the point of putting D&D into an RTS: We want D&D-based units in D&D-based combat in large-scale warfare, the keyword there being LARGE-SCALE. And I do *not* mean just making the characters fatter, though that's apparently what the makers of the game interpreit it as.

On the other hand, if you've never actually played any D&D game in your life, but you like stupid-looking RTS games with sub-par gameplay, BUY IT NOW.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/03/06