Don't let my hours mislead you, I largely played this game in offline mode, which steam does not track, so I have likely about 25 or so hours.
Dragon Commander... I really wish Steam had a so-so ratings for games, because this game, is about as close to "just ok" as you can get and If I had to describe this game with a select few words they would be: wasted potential. I personally don't like it but maybe that's because of me, as I'll explain.
Story: Lets get this out of the way, this game is advertised as an RTS where you can turn into a Dragon with a jetpack and command an army of troops, who the hell DOESN'T want that? I know I sure did so of course I bought Dragon Commander. Storywise As a 'chosen one' type hero game it is up to you to restore peace and order to the lands by defeating your power hungry siblings and stuff because story reasons anyways. Anyways the premise isn't what's important that gives this game one of its largest selling points is the npc characters you talk to and deal without outside of skirmish battles, there's a surprisingly amount of depth to them and some of their character arcs are, very unexpected depending on your choices. Needless to say your not all going to be friends at the start of the game. You will also marry one of the races's royalities later on for political reasons, and this all ties into the choices matter aspect. There's a neat plot twist later on in the game that I really like thou.
Graphics: This is the best part of the game in my opinion, this game just screams "FANTASY EYECANDY" with it's gorgeous high fantasy art direction, but it's not as good as it could be, as I will get to later.
Gameplay: This is worst part about this game and the sole reason it's getting a thumbs down from me.
So the RTS battles are where the meat of the game's gameplay is at, and it's a very watered down RTS to say the least. Everything is slow, battles take a long time, your special power: (turning into a dragon, despite being updated as you go) gets more and more useless as time goes on. Oh yeah, about the dragon form: you enter into a 3rd person, I want to say jet-fighter like control scheme, but you have free movement in all directions unless your holding space. The controls here are suprisingly not that bad, but pretty underwelming. You win when you destroy all your enemy's recruitment centers (or citadel for campaign home turfs) and this usually happesn by waging a war of attrition and that makes the matches last a long time.
Long story short: it's very bland and very slow, there just isn't any punch to anything going on most of the time and it hardly feels like you even commanding mechs around and more like toys. The sound design really does not help here with this either.
I would say it's a cool game, but there's some very big glaring issues that I-personally would not buy it if I knew about:
Mild Spoilers
-This game has so much cut content it's not even funny, if you bought the Imperial Edition and watched the making-of video that came with it, you'll know that about 90% of the game's original content was cut, and it, really shows with this lack luster game sadly. Other reviews to state this game as a bargain bin title are correct to think that as it was nothing more than a side dish for Divinity Original Sin. The concept art alone provided in the Imperial Edition proves just how much more of a game this title used to be sadly :(
-The game has some optimization issues: I have played this game across 3 systems, but on my latest system when viewing a skirmish battle from the corner or during enough fighting, the game drops below 60 FPS at 1920x1080, max settings. This is on my RTX 2060 Super/Ryzen 3600. For a game that came out in 2013, that shouldn't be happening with hardware from July 2019. This only seems suggest a main reason better as to why the ports of this game to consoles were cancelled (aside from controls, of course). You can even tell that while the trees fade in the distance, the terrain itself doesn't seem to have any reductions in levels of detail to it (the entire thing is rendered at once in full detail from the looks of it, not good)
-The story has a few moments where I seriously questioned what the writers were thinking. In what logical fantasy universe where NATURE loving ELVES would approve of gay marriage? (yes, this is a choice you have to make) And yet the undead are against it despite being completely unnaturally living themselves. I'm not against Gay Marriage infact I have special feelings for another man myself, it's just, out of all the races at the council it's the ELVES who are for it?
-While the ending had a nice promise building up to an epic boss fight, it literally ends the moment you win the last skirmish, there's no boss fight or anything that properly uses your Dragon mechanic which really sucks and left me feeling completely dissatisfied with the game after I beat it.
-Imperial Edition OST does not include all the tracks as promised, thankfully you can find them on youtube!
-You can cheese through story mode's skirmish battles and win every one of them with mercenary cards and auto resolve, likely possible to beat the game in one sitting thanks to this
-The Skirmish's aren't any less cheesy either. Remember my comment earlier about attrition being the way to win? Well all you need to do is unlock siege cannons, unlock their ability to fire 3 times while locked in place, spam alot of them, hold a chockpoint, and drain the enemy's support resource. This game literally gives you a very boring means to turtle win to victory if you don't feel like playing a capture-and-hold rush like Dawn of War. This is how I won the campaign years ago and looking at at it today from thou it literally has no strategy involved and the AI won't even try to counter it, which IMO is poor game design.
-During the battles you have this voice that tells you in the worst ways possible that the enemy has some upgrade unlocked and half the time you can barely even hear the voice, it doesn't seem like a big thing but it comes off as jarring
Like I said, if steam had an "ok" choice, I'd pick that. As it stands if you really still wanna try this , wait for a sale, it's worth it for the point&click sections with characters and their gorgeous graphics alone for a sale price of atleast 75%.
