Dragonhold

so far i love the gameplay its beautiful and the music is equally great. The devs are responsive on the discord. So far for where its at a great game

Some parts of this game feel pretty cool and empowering. Reminded me a bit of Drakengard. Some parts are also unpolished. The combat feels a wee bit rigid. But.... You get to be a hero that transforms into a dragon for $20.

This is an extraction looter that's somewhere between a single player RPG and a hack-and-slash. I've given this game a fair shake after its release and here's my review: Game stability: 5/10 - Dying breaks your health bar so you have like 0 health, allowing enemies to oneshot you. I got softlocked on a mission because enemies killed the guy I was supposed to save during an unskippable cutscene by clipping through the cage, I was unable to complete a mission because it crashed during the boss fight, and when the game crashes during a mission, you get nothing and have to start over from the beginning. There's something seriously wrong with how the UI is being handled, because I was able to bring the inventory and merge screens on top of each other, which cascaded into more UI breaking until I needed to alt+F4 to reset the game instance. Enemy balance: 3/10 - Most enemies have terrible AI (no ability to path terrain, they stand completely still when they do happen to get in range), and most challenge is forced (has ability that prevents you from getting in melee for 70% of the time and spams it, gigantic meatwall for no reason other than to exhaust resources or force level grinding). Map design: 6/10 - The extraction map overworld is gigantic to force usage of the dragon, but the massive size of it makes it overwhelmingly empty. This synergizes very poorly with how one gains the ability to use the dragon, since an empty world has no enemies to kill. I'm a bit bothered by the terrain slithering around so much. I can tell it's trying to dynamically handle LODs, but terrain isn't supposed to jitter around even while you're actively standing on it. It's also pointlessly dark in a lot of areas, presumably in an effort to force the player to bring a lantern. Sound design: 6/10 - It took a long while to filter out the repetitive background music, but I think it was worst in the tutorial. Sounds happen largely when you'd expect them (no major delays), but I'd like the aggro/spawn-in to actually try to direct the player to the enemies that have aggroed/spawned. Movement design: 1/10 - Character floats, mouse sensitivity is way too low even at maxed value, combat is clumsy, controlling the dragon is very clumsy (especially while grounded), and this has the worst swim controls I've ever seen in a game. You randomly get animation-locked due to attacking, which can effectively stun you for 1-3 seconds while allowing the brain-dead AI to hit you. However, the thing that made this a 1/10 was the seal slam "minigame." You need to break the seal with the dragon, then slam it as a human from the air. Unfortunately, the slam doesn't obey the reticle at all and has a strict angle requirement, which meshes very poorly with the tiny AoE of it and the tiny effective area of the seal. There's rage games that have bothered me less than this horrendous movement. Character progression: 4/10 - There's a lot of permanent progression in the game, and all of it is flawed. -Weapon upgrades: Absolutely horrid progression system. Instead of creating a number and letting you press upgrade, you have to create swords, then merge them into the sword you want to upgrade. However, it's not a nice 1-for-1. It's more like 30-for-1. Every sword you make takes about 8 seconds of crafting, and the merge page breaks if you have more than 5 of a weapon available to merge. These combine to create a agonizingly slow process of upgrading, all to get like +20% damage. -Buildings: The extraction map basically only drops resources from overworld chests, which they made incredibly sparse and randomly generated. They seem to have also introduced diminishing returns for a single run, which means even if you get lucky with chests on one run, you'll start seeing a bunch of them drop nothing after reaching the soft cap. Every building takes massive amounts of resources. You'll get one every 3-4 extractions, and making a building comes at the cost of making equipment or upgrading other buildings. Worse, some of the buildings outright lie about their function. Namely, the lighthouse and starting focus levels. Wish I'd known that before losing a bunch of resources building it. -Gear: Who had the bright idea of making the player drop their equipped gear on death? It's super fun to spend several runs gathering rare droprate items to make something, dying, and losing it to the void because the game is particularly terrible at keeping your items above-ground or in a lootable spot. Question: why in the world does every item have its own fragments? Answer: it's because devs wanted to flood the player's limited inventory. Question: why is every fragment the same rarity when certain ones are starter weapons and others are endgame weapons? Answer: devs didn't consider human compatibility at all when designing the shard system, so you're forced to study every weapon in the game to figure out which fragment you should drop and which you should carry. Other notable aspects: -Game has currency buyable with real-world money. This might be pay-to-win since each skin is effectively a loadout slot for that class, but it'd take a lot more development for there to be enough content to need multiple loadouts. -There's supposedly going to be online co-op around, but it's unimplemented. -Game has numerous spelling/grammar mistakes, throughout descriptions and names of items. Overall, I'd say the game is not enjoyable in its current state. Maybe Rogue is actually the worst class, but I can't test the others because it takes a boatload of resources to unlock alternative classes or dragons. Perhaps I'll keep trying to see how many hours of ♥♥♥♥ one must suffer through to reach the "good part," but I'm not holding my breath.

They are advertising this game as a 1.0 release and the first thing I saw when I opened the map was a location marked as WIP. I play a LOT of early access games (what this is despite their 1.0 claims), and this has to be one of the jankiest ones I have ever played. Edit: Dev requested being more specific about the aforementioned jank. Not sure this is really what you want other potential players to see, but here goes... The combat feels awful and like something from the early 2000s. The button mapping is absolute hotdog water and remapping buttons is hit or miss. The game pops up tutorial windows suddenly that attempt to explain stuff, but half the time they appear during combat and you continue hitting the attack button or something and they disappear immediately. Nothing relevant is really explained well, unless it was in one of the previously mentioned accidentally skipped pop ups. The enemy AI is minimal at best and enemies just keep popping in and attacking as you run around the map and there are seemingly very few ways to heal. The story is written in a very amateurish way that seems to expect the player to care deeply about people/places that were just briefly introduced moments before. The first mission I played, the exit portal just suddenly reset requiring doing the whole exit combat over. The mission I played tells you to "find your dragon" but then you somehow just happen to be able to summon it at some point. The dragon is basically useless as you don't get rewards for kills with it. There is a power slot that is supposed to unlock at level 8, but if you just slot a power in it, it opens at whatever level you happen to be at that time. As mentioned previously, there is a "work in progress" location on the map in a "full release" title. Devs response says it is for an upcoming free update. Not sure I buy that seeing everything else that is work in progress as well, but sure. The resolution was locked at 1440p until I got in game, then it allowed me to scroll through all of the resolution options (screen resizing with each click) to get to the desired 4k option. One of the jankiest resolution selection menus I have witnessed. I could go on, but I am sure you get the point. All this was with ONE HOUR of gameplay. This is either NOT a 1.0 release, or it is one of the worst "finished" products I have ever played. The one positive I will say about the game is that it seemed to run relatively smoothly and locked at the max selected refresh rate. That is a rarity these days.

only played for a short time but really enjoying it so far! a few small bugs but when its an indie company with what... 3 people working on it.... its expected. very nice feeling flying!

A lot of potential but terrible execution. Also, for some reason the review system is not letting me use language like "Trash" or "Garbage", so... well NOW it is Anyway, this game is CLEARLY inspired by an old game called "Drakon: Order of the Flame", but for some reason isn't nearly as fun as that ancient forgotten title.

The game has a lot of potential. There are some hicups but it is early access. As a solo player thus far, I have enjoyed the game. There is a challenge to the game, but once you get used to the mechanics, you can successfully solo raids. Been waiting for a decent dragon game and this one ticks a lot of the boxes, go out and get loot, hoard loot and get rich slowly... The combat is still a tad basic, been playing as a knight, will try one of the other classes once I max out my current character... But even with basic combat, the game is still enjoyable. The raids atm mostly take place on one large island with different card modifiers that change the weather, you starting and exact paths... There's also cards that change the quest you take on and the bounty that you can complete. As for the map itself, there's lots to explore, there are dungeons, as well as other to-dos... For an early access game, it performs well. I have been playing nonstop for more than 8 hours, and I have not had a single crash did restart once, but that's because I have Chrome running for YouTube alongside ten other browser windows. As I mentioned, there's potential, and I hope to see more content for the game.

tried to play this game with friends and wouldnt load us in game together even tho we were in fireteam also would freeze while joining servers game also has no clear objectives on map will let it sit in library until flushed out