Alrighty. Um. Wow!
So first up while the trailer seems relatively accurate to the contents of the game, the screenshots on the store page are mostly fabricated. So that's amazing right there. Great start!
Drake of the 99 Dragons is apparently some sort of infamously bad game. Going in, my only real familiarity with this game was just seeing some brief gameplay on YouTube. I found myself drawn in by the shooting, because I was like hey, I've played some really bad first and third person shooters in my time, the shooting looks surprisingly decent. Maybe this game is worth checking out.
And, after beating the game from start to finish, all 25 levels, I gotta say: the shooting is actually not the worst. There's some merits to this terrible game.
And it is a terrible game.
It's hard to breakdown just how bad this game is, and what kind of bad it is, because while at times the game does feel like some other more generic bargain bin shooters from the era, it also has some elements as mentioned that redeem it. This game is on the level of, but worse than, games like Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death, if you ever played that one, released the same year by a pretty low end studio.
Judge Dredd, however, was pretty widely regarded as a pointless bargain bin title by critics of the time. That perhaps might give you an idea of how low a game 'Drake of the 99 Dragons' is, because this is even worse than that.
So first up: the game runs in some 4:3 resolution. I don't know what. 1024x768? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change this or make it better in any way. This is a game where you open the options menu and there's two settings, like some games from the 360 era, where every game's options menu looked like that when they ported it half-assedly to PC. There's two options, music volume and sound effects volume. That's it. Do you want Music 1 or Music 5? It doesn't even go to 10, inexplicably. So that's just great.
Anyway, so aside from the main menu, there's the game itself.
As soon as the game starts, you get a tutorial. I'm something of a connoisseur of tutorials in games, and the one in this game, is surprisingly decent. It's not the best thing ever, really, but I was impressed they basically introduce you to many of the concepts that you're gonna see throughout the game. Not all, but the important stuff. After, there are some amazingly exposition-heavy cutscenes where Drake lays out, oh there's a relic, we the 99 Dragons control it and have for a long ass time, oh no the relic is being stolen, I guess I have to get it back - and thus the game begins.
The game's controls are noteworthy too for being... not great? And your powers which are unlocked gradually for no apparent reason during the course of the game, also control not great and don't seem to have too much of a point, and can barely be considered powers anyway.
It should be noted too that in this first level, you start off with NO powers. This is one of those things games did once in a while during this era, where, even if they had some notion of you becoming some super powered badass, every now and then for the first level they'd basically make you play as the biggest wimp ever. An example of this is perhaps, Jedi Academy by Raven Software, where you're a pathetic weakling to begin with and then get your real powers after the first mission. Jedi Outcast proceeds the same way, Clive Barker's Jericho, which released a bit later, has you play as a Call of Duty man for the first mission in the game, before you transition into a body-hopping immortal ghost.
But in Drake of the 99 Dragons, basically this just means that there are literally no health pickups in the first level of the game and it sucks really badly.
A trend throughout this game, is if you ♥♥♥♥ around near enemies, many of them are so powerful and so strong, they will absolutely vaporize you in less than a second if you give them the chance. Despite this, and in creating a game with almost exclusively enemies with hitscan projectiles, they were smart enough surprisingly to make it so that if you basically strafe around the point of aim of enemies, they actually have to turn to keep up with you, and so generally, so long as you keep moving in one direction, you can often throw off the aim of any enemy you fight. It's actually like... good. Like, it's a good design decision, in a game full of terrible ones.
The health pickup thing is truly bizarre and a great example of why this game is bad and why it is so broken. After a couple missions you get the ability to draw in souls, aka health, from any death in the mission. All you have to do, is press RIGHT SHIFT + E. This then enables the ability to draw in health, from any enemy that dies, until the mission ends. There is no timer, no resource cost, nothing. I have no explanation as to why it works like this.
But, to contrast that, the shooting is great, in certain ways. Just using WASD to move around and aiming and shooting with the mouse, is actually pretty responsive, the game actually seems to capture your mouse pretty well, like hardware cursor style innately. While many games of this age and era can sometimes not play well with the mouse, I'm playing this game 23 years on and aiming and shooting is flawless. That's actually commendable. Moving around with WASD is intuitive, Drake can run up or along walls and it works surprisingly well, and you can double-jump and hop up walls to get to new heights. Moving in this game, is surprisingly really good.
The only thing is, the level design completely lets it all down. Given even in the last couple levels, they are AGGRESSIVELY highlighting the way they expect the player to go, they never had confidence in their players to actively navigate levels and use their movement tech for the sake of the game. In addition, the level designers clearly had no idea how to actually highlight things in the game and make them intuitively seem important or of use to the player. People joke about the 'yellow paint' thing in games? But at least that's a good example of a game being readable to the player. If you go back to this era, where no one knew what they were doing, you get some real wild west stuff - such as Drake of the 99 Dragons, where there's just nothing.
Now, fortunately, the levels in this game, are SO small and so short, I was able to beat this game from start to finish in just under 3 hours, and I was not even trying to speedrun it. So it's rare to actually get lost in a level for long enough that, you're confused where to go, and most levels except for maybe one are big enough or confusing enough to where you might get stuck at all. This is not due to their level design being good though.
In an example of how kinda primitive and funky this game is, their big idea for like player progression was to just use Doom-style keycards. There's red, green and blue keycards and they're in use in a couple different levels, but I think only one actually uses all three. I have this feeling that maybe whoever worked on that level kinda made up the concept then and there for that level, since it was also the first appearance of keycards, and then they started using them kinda consistently throughout the game afterward. I get it, too, it's an easy way to add complexity to a level, and make it seem or make it actually more complicated than it is.
It's just too bad that inexplicably every level(?) in this game is timed. A couple of them have seemingly strict timers, but most are an extremely generous 10 minutes, and most levels really don't take that long to do.
Anyway, while I could go on I'm at the character limit. Basically, while I actually was somewhat entertained, it was not because the game is at all good. I cannot recommend it, because I don't think anyone really needs to or should play this game. But, for my own morbid curiosity about a bad game, I was satisfied.
