Dragonshard

"All right game, but lacking some important RTS features"

This is an all right game, there's a few new unique things, though the RTS genre pretty much has all the ideas that are ever going to come already in it. The storyline of the campaign is pretty good I'd have to say, and the structure of carryovers from scenario to scenario is well balanced...

Gameplay (30/40): The gameplay in this is fairly good, it's geared towards short games (for skirmish mode anyway), since the gold resource is fairly limited and is depleted pretty quickly, and the amount generated from buildings is very minimal. The pre-determined "town center" type objects also make it a short game type, since the primary goal in the game is pretty much to take control of all the possible locations to build anything. There's also no autosave...

Controls (2/10): The controls in this game are mediocre, at best, you can't deselect units without clicking on another unit or building, there's no hotkeys for unit functions, and it's kind of awkward when trying to select many units and use any special battle skill of anything but the primary unit. You can get used to it eventually, but I feel that easy to use hotkeys and unit selection/deselection/grouping is VERY important in an RTS.

Campaign storyline (19/20): The storyline of the campaign is very good, nice descriptive cutscenes, good storyline progression, and the carryover from scenario to scenario in the campaign is done nicely. You cannot make a fatal error in one scenario that will make it impossible to finish the next scenario, nor can you do something in one scenario that overpowers your hero and makes the rest of the game too easy. However, the usefulness of the carryover is very low as well, the potential benefits of whatever you can bring from scn to scn is marginal at best, it's kind of in there more for show then anything else, and to allow the player to feel like he can customize his hero a little bit (which is a good thing)

Multiplayer (0/10): Nothing to say here, the multiplayer setup is terrible, it's almost impossible to get a game started.

Tutorial/Instructional Scenario/Etc.. (9/10): Tutorials were OK, ALTHOUGH, there were some issues in them, you CAN screw up in a tutorial (Something that should be carefully designed so that it's not possible to mess up in a tutorial), and their a bit too long and boring in some parts (like they could've made unit training / constructing buildings go by faster instead of making the player wait for them to complete), though the tutorials DO cover just about every aspect in the game. The tutorials are also broken up into parts where you can pick which part you want to use, so you don't have to go thru stuff like "RTS basics of clicking your unit and using it" when you already know that. In game hints are annoying, but you can disable them so no deduction for that.

Other aspects, sound, graphics, etc.. (7/10): Graphics were OK.. nothing special, but not too bad either, sound.. was OK as well, again, nothing special. the game runs pretty stable, at least on my system..

Total score: 67/100

Other deductions/additions:

-3 for.. Excessive startup screens, you have to manually skip like 5 intro movies, that is a little bit ridiculous
-2 for.. Bad patching procedure, for some reason instead of JUST patching, it needs to reinstall the whole game with the patch (at least it takes just as long to patch it as it does to install it)
+1 for.. Nice loading screens in the game :)

FINAL SCORE: 63/100

Rounded: 6/10

Overall: It is an OK RTS with a pretty decent storyline campaign. Multiplayer is pretty much broken at this point. You would probably enjoy the game if you enjoy playing RTS campaigns, but you would be disappointed if you are a hardcore RTS player or wanted multiplayer action on the internet.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/10/05