Dragonkin: The Banished

I know they're all part dragons, but why make them all look like hideous burnt victims.

I fully admit to going into this game with rather tepid expectations. I am more than pleasantly surprised. At current, I have played around three hours, I played through the tutorial/story set-up scenario, have only leveled a single type of character (there are four archetypes), and have only engaged with single-player/offline. Multiplayer will not be a factor in this review, so do consider that accordingly. From a pure "nuts and bolts" perspective, at least early game, there's nothing overly unique other than the way skills are handled. A lot of the systems are heavily inspired from other similar genre entries. However, each of these systems is done well in this game, meshes well with overall progression, and is fairly intuitive with details provided clearly where needed. This gives an excellent sense of character progression and development with a fair degree of control over your build, but doesn't add arbitrary friction as it offers full freedom to manipulate, tweak, respec, and redo any assignments under any system. The pseudo-meta-progression in the "city building" system is quite nice as well. In general, it has been fun to tinker with pretty much everything the game has shown me thus far. Visually the game is just outright fantastic. I admittedly expected a bit of a bait and switch on the graphics since quite a few games these days appear to record their trailers on a NASA supercomputer, but with whatever the stock settings the game settled on, it looks excellent. Environments are highly detailed, enemies are varied, and while some stuff can come off a bit goofy-looking, it does all still feel appropriate given the eldritch-adjacent theming of the overall narrative. Core gameplay is, similarly, very nice. Skills feel response and have distinct differences in how they feel to use, enemy AI seems fine, and other than some visual weirdness caused by movement skill/dodges into a cutscene, there's no stuttering, rubberbanding, what have you. Balance can get a bit weird with the difficulty and mid-zone leveling--enemies will only "level correct" once you reload a zone--and I spent a while being utterly unable to acquire a weapon upgrade which was annoying, but otherwise the only glaring issue might just be baseline character speed. It feels like as you progress you get a lot of tools to tweak and up your mobility, which makes the earliest levels feel a bit slog-ish, and I imagine by end-game things will be all but a blur. The story exists. There is objectively a story. Given the surprising level of quality in the voice acting, I'm actually a little sad the story and dialogue isn't better than it is. If I were going to give a granular score, this is probably where I would dock the most points just due to this specific element falling short relative to everything else so far. It isn't bad--just not as good as the rest. Sound design is also quite good. Pleased with the background music and I've yet to feel the overwhelming compulsion to mute the game because I'm tired of hearing the sounds of my attacks and character grunting repeatedly like in so many other games. My only point of irritation here is I keep laying on the spacebar to dodge and triggering the cooldown voice lines. If I could disable those, specifically, I probably would. Overall, very happy with this. I would be so even had I purchased at full price. Heavily considering the cosmetic nonsense just as a matter of principle. Would recommend for anyone that likes highly customized character progression with multiple systems or is otherwise looking for a decent ARPG that doesn't demand full time job hours. Good stuff.