DragonStrike

THIS IS A DREAM COME TRUE FOR ME! It was my favorite game as a teen, played it for so many hours. I am really really happy they brought it back to life. THANK YOU SNEG 11/10 !!! Now for a detailed review of the game itself: It is a dragon battle simulator, where you play as a dragon rider. You play through various missions, quite a lot of missions actually, on a large map, and your character progresses from one mission to the other. You gain more hit-points, you gain magic items (healing potions, protection cloaks etc) and once every few missions you can replace your dragon with a stronger one, but at a cost of sacrificing some items. The Dragons are diverse, they have different number of hit-points, armour, and innate qualities which control their speed and breath weapons (fire, lightning, frost, poison), which do different damages. You control the dragon as you fly over a large landmass, you control the height it flies to, and can maneuver him in a 360 degrees arc while doing so. You also possess a lance, which you can also maneuver to strike down other flying creatures and kill them. The maps are quite large, containing land masses with features such as castles, oceans with ships (which you can attack and destroy and which shoot arrows at you when you approach them), and of course as your dragon can move up and down you have the whole skies to fight other dragons, wyverns, manticores and other flying creatures. The battles are intense, the enemies AI is reasonable, and while at first you fight single enemies, when you arrive at the more advanced missions you get to fight a large number of them at once. When you finish all the scenarios, you get a free-for-all mode where you can place on the map as many enemies as you like to fight (up to 99 i think) at the same time and determine the settings, which is just wonderful, and allows for infinite replayability. The graphics are very dated (obviously for a game created in 1990, that's 33 years ago!) but there is something charming to it, in the same way minecraft is charming these days, and at the end you forget about it and just focus on the good gameplay. Finally, you can change the keybinding to control every aspect of the game, which is excellent. To sum it all up - an amazing game, a rare gem, which begs for a remake, very well executed for its time and allows you many challanging hours of fun. BUY IT, YOU WONT REGRET IT, I PROMISE YOU! <I hope this review helped you decide, if it did, show your love with likes and awards :)>

For Sturm!

Great game if you played it at release as a kid back then. If you didn't, I can't see why you would consider buying this, except if you're a young masochist that enjoy trying to master these old games. Controls can be customized, despite what another negative review stated, and you can use a mouse if you want. Press ESC and there's a menu. You [i]should[/i] customize the controls, as the default control scheme seems to be intended for someone with three arms. It's a little hard to get used to the controls again in the beginning. I would recommend that you read the manual and stick to using the keyboard. It is important to frequently look behind you (F3) to avoid being hit by enemy breath weapons. The FPS will most likely be too low or too high for your system too, so press Ctrl-F12 (increase DOSBox CPU cycles) and Ctrl-F11 (reduce CPU cycles) until you find the sweet spot. In my case I had to increase CPU cycles ten times for the game to be as smooth as it could be. This is a review of the game itself, not the Steam re-release. Adding it to Steam as a DOSBox-emulated game is frankly low-effort, and--at this price point--a cash grab. Still, nice to have it available for purchase on Steam.

DragonStrike ist ein früher Drachenkampf-Flugsimulator mit ein paar sehr leichten RPG-Elementen. Klar, spielerisch fühlt sich vieles ziemlich retro an, aber genau das macht für mich einen großen Teil des Charmes aus. Irgendetwas an diesem simplen, aber unglaublich spaßigen Kern hat mich immer wieder gepackt, sodass ich es tatsächlich mehrmals durchgespielt habe. Klare Empfehlung!

DragonStrike is an ancient game from 1990. It's a "flight" simulator/RPG hyrbid as your ride dragons from the Dragonlance campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons, during the War of the Lance era. Take on the role of a Solamnic Knight and dragon rider, fight the forces of Neraka by outmaneuvering your enemies, stabbing them with your Dragonlance, or using your dragons breath weapons. This is an okay premise for the game, but the problem is it's simply far too outdated. It's a whopping 33 years old at the time of this review. The game runs in DOSBOX and lacks proper 16:9 aspect ratio and support for any modern gaming display resolutions (it's locked at VGA resolution, you have no choice), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. That might have been the way of things in the past, but it's not okay for this day and age. There's no mouse support either, and the game doesn't take advantage of 3D accelerators, so you get low framerates and completely wonky numberpad controls... it's unpleasant to play for anyone accustomed to modern, mature game interfaces. DragonStrike is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at a whopping $6 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. While this might be a ripe title for a remake, that's not what's happened here. As the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

Honestly, it's pretty good. If you've been thirsting for some content where you can actually control the dragons of DnD and where the good dragons don't all die in cutscenes so that the players can feel powerful, then it's what you need. That said, a few words of advice. 1) RE-MAP THE CONTROLS. This game was made when a mouse was not a standard computer accessory! And the controls reflect that. You'd need three arms and twenty fingers to play with the default controls. 2) The game must be told that you intend to play it with a mouse. Hit escape while in game to bring up the pause menu, select the option in the lower-left, and cycle that option until it shows a weird brick thing that's meant to be a mouse. You could play without a mouse if you wanted, but that seems like a bad idea. 3) Your dragon will handle like a drunken rhinoceros if flying at top speed, but their control becomes much more precise at low speed. This is essential to actually landing your attacks. You can pick the rest up by reading the manual, so... best of luck!

dragums

You're gonna take one look at this game and go no. No way. Pass. A dragon flight simulator made in 1990? Eww its probably way too hard, controls like crap and i have better things to do with my time. If you're thinking that you would be wrong about Dragonstrike. The game still holds today. Yes it has its issues, its quiet, the controls take some getting used to and the enemies get a little repetitive but I mean come on, its 1990, you must have already known that. I think the big question is, is it beatable today or is it one of those games that's an absolutely pain in the ass to suffer through. I guess the answer to that question is both depending on what kind of gamer you are. If you are an impatient gamer and do not want to waste time to learn the mechanics of the game then immediately pass on this one. It ain't for you. But if you a gamer that perseveres or like me, a completionist, here is what you need to know. To beat Dragonstrike its all about messing with the settings and making sure your controls are as comfortable as possible. Make sure you set the dragons from pixel to polygon, much easier to hit them that way. Remove the lance and use a cursor instead. Change the environment settings to slow the dragon movement down. Last but not least, set your controls to be as comfortable as possible flying around. I use WASD for movement and the diagonal keys for the lance movement and it worked wonders. Once you get all that down, hop in there and lose, and be okay with losing and trying again. I promise eventually you will get used to it. The difficulty spikes here and there but you already knew that would be likely. Otherwise to be honest the only thing that I hated is the gear you get, outside of that feather that stops you from falling to fast, is just absolutely useless and having to micromanage your health cause you don't heal in between missions sucks. That said, Dragonstrike is great and very beatable for the average gamer. You just have to be someone who takes the time to do it.

Pretty good port to be honest! I used to play the Amiga version all the time, I still actually have the box and disks, all the goodies with it too. But for the PC version , its very close to the Amiga version. But better imo. The speed seems proper, back in the day it was a little easier since "poly games" were a lot of assets on the screen caused that classic slowdown. Kinda like with the NES... Megaman for example.. too many objects it slows down. Anyways, just but this. Experience the glory of 3 different knighthoods, each with their own dragon type. This game was crazy advanced for its time. And its still fun today.

When Top Gun Meet Dungeons and Dragons