Game is a mix of genres really. As a Dragon Commander you have your crew, your standing in the realm and army, which you send over to fight or command and fight with. It's a mongrel of RTS, RPG and political strategy.
I'll start with that - It’s visibly unpolished game in many aspects. A lot of tooltips do not have solid background, making text often being hard to read on some screens. The action cards look like someone took MTG card template and added text on it in MS Paint. The same goes with all dialogues in a game, which does not pan well. While it’s low severity issues, it gets bit tad annoying and requires you to get used to it or work around these.
The RTS element is not bad, but it's tad basic too. When you move army into enemy territory you can play it out or let AI of your generals do the work. If you control your armies, you are limited to what you bring and what your technology allows you to additionally build. It's never that you just start a new base and play it out, if you come with insufficient force you will get obliterated, and vice versa, if you come with overwhelming force you can just steamroll enemy without building anything. Yet, it's very basic as you can build recruitment centre which gives you resource, 3 production buildings for new units and couple turrets. Except that you are to fight toward enemy base(s) and capture or destroy them. During that phase you can take control of Dragon and attack from the sky, though you're just as strong as single unit with decent DPS, so you can't just fly into enemy base and burn it. In general, it's not bad, but does not gives much to choose and fighting on same map for third time might get very boring.
Main hub of the game gives you access to strategy map where you build units, move armies and play against opponents which comes to RTS element of the game. The "RPG" part comes to being emperor, researching new skills and tech and managing your generals and advisors. Here comes politics, where you need to select options for your crew or kingdom which will give specific results.
Here also comes well known ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Larian Studios story writing and pacing. While generals are bickering and sometimes simply silly, you can live with that. However, the council and playing politics... is what in the end made me tired of this game. In general, you have 5 faction: Undead, Dwarfs, Elves, Lizard and Imps. And each time, you have political decision to make it's Undead & Dwarves vs Elves and Lizards, with Imps neutral or with Elves. That means you will lose support of two of them always and either you make decision once toward one group and then toward another, you will find lacking support.
Why it matters? As you fight on map that specific faction lives, if you have low support, you can't recruit many additional units during battle, which requires you to make bigger armies to come. And this mechanic is simply stupid, when it comes to this game as Larian did not even tried to mask current political topics and just shove it right in Players face. While I do understand that such integrated politics are part of this game and fits the theme of Emperor, at first you're told "common man cares about common thing, feeding their families etc" you're off start to decide about public health care, drug legalization, euthanasia, state censorship... and as I said it's always one group against another so even if you play on casual and play by your own conscience and values, you will lose on it. That made me grow really tired of this game, especially if you go against proposed law change and hear how heartless or stupid you are EVER ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TIME basically.
After every turn when I completed RTS phase and came back to Raven, and had new NPC dialogues, be it will your feminazi general, hippie elf councillor, high-and-mighty reptiles, drunken half-human or pyromaniac imps, it simply reeked with stuff you hear in news weekly. I don’t mind those kinds of themes in games and I do not shy of it, but in case of Dragon Commander it’s shove without pardon into your face and made you make a choice, and all of them will be wrong. If there would be middle option it could be saved, but it always pushes you to go far-right or far-left which is simply draining and made me felt disdain for the game.
I did not played skirmishes nor multiplayer, but if those throw this feature out of the window, game might be good if you grab it cheaply, but in general I would avoid it and grab something else.
