Part of the joys of loading up a new RPG is settling in a big, comfy chair, stretching out your work-worn legs and getting transported to another world for immersive story-telling and interesting characters. That is, if it’s done right. Dragon Blaze, developed by Gamevil, doesn’t do it right.
Here’s the first thing that you will notice straight out of the gate when booting up Dragon Blaze: the sheer amount of crap you have to wade your way through just to get to the actual game part of this game. Hey, you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money for some boots and a bunch of virtual coins? No? Why not? How about this stuff to upgrade your character? It’s only thirty bucks!
The game will try to offer you “deals” that you can only pay for “right now” or “it’s gone forever” every time you start the game. Here’s the thing; no, I don’t want extra goodies to make the game easier. It’s almost like the clerk from the gas station down the street from my house knocking on my door every morning when I wake up to try and sell me a Twix bar. If I want your crap, I’ll let you know. You don’t need to shove it down my throat.
Oh, and the game is free. But it doesn’t really matter because I’d rather pay for a game like Dragon Blaze if it meant that I wouldn’t be badgered to buy shoes for my characters every three minutes.
The story of the game goes something like this: Dragons are bad and they hate people. War ensues. It’s not just dragons, either. Pretty every other fantasy race plus Dragons is at war with humans, too. Apparently, we are not well-liked in this world. So you take the role of a blank-faced protagonist that is defined by his or her class. Which would you like to be? The blank-faced warrior? Perhaps the blank-faced mage? Looking for a Challenge? Take on the role of a blank-faced rogue! I chose the warrior and, by this point, I was so annoyed with slashing my way through adds that I named him “Turdmuffin.”
On to the next truly baffling thing about this game; it’s not hard. You don’t need those add-ons the game is constantly offering at all. The only things that you may need to buy are shoes, because the amount of shoes you possess equals the number of movements your character can take in a day (before the game cuts you off). However, your shoes refresh every day, and you have thirty of them. I would be surprised if anyone played this game long enough to use all thirty shoes.
Gameplay consists of little more than battles, wherein PCs and NPCs auto-attack one another, leaving you to press one button to do your special attack, then wait for the cool down to complete so you can do it again. And that’s about it. To make it go by a bit faster, my suggestion would be to make a sandwich or take a quick nap while the battle goes on. I did that a couple of times and actually won. My presence wasn’t even necessary. The game played itself.
Sure, you can play dress up with your party of adventurers and give them better weapons and armor, but other than that, it’s nothing. There is no role-playing in this role-playing game, no real story and all the interactions between the characters in someway relates to how you have to kill more monsters before they eat the world.
So the story is bad, the characters are made of cardboard and the actual gameplay could be handled by an infant. On top of all of that, the game will try and sell you snake oil every time you boot it up.
What this game needs badly is a sense of purpose and a definite scaling back of all the offers it is clearly desperate to sell. Even while I played it, I didn’t feel anything urging me to continue. The game hangs its hat on combat, but the combat isn’t engaging, interesting and worst of all, I had trouble staying awake in order to participate in it.
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Hardcore?
Nope, nah and No!
Monotonous gameplay mixed with shameless shills.
