I Of The Dragon for Windows

The I of the Dragon is a role playing game (RPG) where you play a dragon that flies across various landscapes while killing monsters and destroying buildings. It reminds me a lot of a D&D computer game from the early 90's called Dragonstrike where you rode around on the back of a dragon and fought other dragons. Neither game was very good, but for different reasons.

This is more of a real-time strategy (RTS) game than an RPG. The RPG element mostly just includes missions and level building where you can adjust your dragon's stats. The missions are all of the 'go kill this' variety and not that complicated. When you start the game, you can choose from one of three different types of dragons, where one focuses more on spells and another on brawn while the third is the balanced one. The problem with a lot of real-time strategy games is that they are too boring and it takes forever to accomplish anything. That is the problem with The I of the Dragon. The longer you play, the more repetitive and tedious it becomes.

The game is played using a 3D terrain map much like one you might find in Warcraft III or Dungeon Siege. The movement centers around the dragon, but you can zoom in and out or spin a full 360 degrees around to see where the targets are. You can also adjust the elevation of the dragon to get a wider look of the playing field and to better dodge enemy fire. The graphics are pretty good, but could be a lot better. The animation is pretty nice and there's lots of variety, but you don't get many chances for close-up views of anything. Basically, this looks like a game from 3 years ago. At least it runs nice and smooth on my PC and my nearly outdated Radeon X300 video card.

The controls are simple; too simple. You use the left mouse button to click a destination for the dragon to move and the right mouse button to attack. I think it would have been a lot better if you could freely move the dragon around instead of doing the 'click for destination' thing. Your dragon can attack with fireballs, fire breath, spells, or he can swoop in and grab a creature and eat it. The catch and eat part is pretty bloody, but cool to watch. As your dragon goes up in level, you can increase skill points that will let the dragon move faster, do more damage, and breathe more power, plus you can learn different spells.

There isn't much strategy involved with this game and the role playing elements are weak, so what you get with The I of the Dragon is a RTS/RPG that lacks on both sides. During combat, you just move in, shoot, then move out. That's pretty much it. You can swoop in and breathe fire on a target, but that is your most powerful attack and you have to wait and recharge after doing it a few times. Your fireball attack works pretty well at close range, but the long distance shots are about as random as my golf swing.

The graphics are pretty good. The sound is alright, but nothing special. The idea is fairly original. It is part RTS and RPG. So what's the biggest problem with this game? It's boring as hell! The dragon hovers around so slowly and all the enemy units take at least 3 or 4 hits to die, so even the most mundane battle takes time and offers no real challenge. It only gets difficult when you are surrounded, but you can draw out individual attackers and nail them one at a time, which takes even more time. This is not something you'd want to play for more than about half an hour at a time, and I expect more from my games than that.

This will end up in the bargain bin pretty quick, I'm sure. It was released in March of 2004 and you can find it on Ebay for pretty cheap, but don't bother unless you just have to play it.