Divinity: Dragon Commander Review
That's a dragon commander, not a commander of dragons
That might have something to do with the final slice of Dragon Commander's combat, which allows ham-fisted buffoons like myself to play the hero and turn the tide of battle all on our own. Yes, the 'dragon' part of Dragon Commander finally comes into play, letting you transform into a fiery winged beast mid-way through RTS sections and swoop in to fix things up with a barrage of fireballs and magical abilities. It sounds gimmicky, as if Dragon Commander had taken a peek at Brutal Legend's notes in the exam and wondered if maybe it was onto something with an action focus, but this feature works surprisingly well: fly around, dash with your jetpack while dodging enemy attacks, cast spells to heal or buff your allies, rip into priority targets that your foolish underlings have failed to get rid of, so on and so forth.
You quickly learn to fear and despise anti-air units, though, and in larger battles it's hard to get into the fray for more than a second or two before chunks of overgrown airborne lizard start raining down on the landscape. Being killed doesn't actually do anything significant though - it just boots you back to RTS mode with a small penalty - so the question that arises is why you would ever not want to enter dragon mode. Simple answer? Controlling your units from this perspective is about as intuitive and accurate as performing open heart surgery with a forklift. You can make various selections and point to a specific location that needs to die, so in theory it should have been perfect for me and my oven-glove strategies, but aiming somewhere very specific on the battlefield that may or may not be within view with enemy ground-to-air missiles on your tail is a daunting task, if not practically impossible, and in any case doing anything so complex as manufacturing more units or managing control groups will require a three day course in the relevant key binds, so as soon as you've exhausted your dragon's arsenal it's back to good old eye-in-the-sky mode for some more exciting attack-move action. As an aside, I'd like to know why exactly I need twenty recruits in order to spawn my dragon. It's probably for balance reasons, but what's the canonical explanation? Does the emperor-to-be need a team of masseuses on standby to give him a back-rub before he feels sufficiently motivated to lend a helping hand? Or, on a more sinister note, just how much do dragons eat before flying into battle, anyway?
A strategy game isn't a strategy game unless you can pit yourself against an opponent other than a slab of silicon and some wires, so in deference to this Dragon Commander packs some multiplayer options. You can play through an entire campaign if you're stark raving mad - that is to say, the whole turn-based map, complete with research and upgrades and only minor tweaks to the single player gameplay - or you can play a skirmish match, which is just the RTS mode with standardized units. Since both options are essentially just Dragon Commander's single player modes with squishy fleshlings taking the place of your opponents, whether they're any good is decided largely on whether you enjoyed the single player. If you did, congratulations, because you're about to receive more of the same. If you didn't, it certainly won't give you an epiphany. Skirmishes also seem to suffer from a touch of the old lag, though this might have just been the fact that I'm probably geographically closer to the magnetic South Pole than I am to our good friends in the United States, where the majority of the games were likely being hosted. I'd have loved to choose a host closer to home, but Dragon Commander's pitifully small community means that you really can't be picky when it comes to which strangers you spend your quality time with.
Dragon Commander is a game full of good ideas and not-quite-as-good execution. Strategising through the various layers of gameplay is a challenge for the grey matter and gives the game some proper depth, but after a while it begins to feel a bit thinly-spread, as if it's trying to cover too many bases and can't quite maintain a high standard across all of them. It does something new and interesting, and for that Larian Studios ought to be applauded, but with new ideas come new problems. Having the real-time and turn-based aspects of the combat influence each-other worked wonders for making me think about what I was doing from a different angle, but it ended up creating a lot of frustrating or just downright dull RTS sections when either my opponent or I had vastly more units than the other on the game board, resulting in the player with the most initial units simply zerg-rushing their unstoppable war machine to victory against a handful of knock-kneed troopers with pea shooters. Furthermore, while having the turn-based combat board encompass everything might seem grandiose, it does mean that if you make a foolish decision - one that will, for example, eventually lead to your demise - it can be up to an hour before you realize you've painted yourself into a corner and the enemy is knocking on your front door. An hour of gameplay down the drain, because you sent a transport ship to the wrong zone or bought the wrong type of units. Now that's a true test of patience: none of this faffing around with conservative checkpoint systems like Shadowrun Returns, just the sudden pit in your stomach as you realize how much story and gameplay you'll have to relive thanks to your own stupidity. Oh well, perhaps I'll pick up the elven princess this time. She seemed like the friendly sort.
More than anything else, Dragon Commander earns its wings on the phenomenon of novelty. Some parts are good, some are mediocre, and there's no particular aspect of it that will blow you away, but the seamless integration of gameplay modes is presented compellingly enough to scrape by. If nothing else, buying Dragon Commander signals to developers that you're not afraid to buy something just because it can't be easily pigeon-holed, and in my book that's a definite step forward for society. Who knows, you might even enjoy it enough to make it your choice of time-sink for a while - I know I did - which will create some much-needed comfort when your travel partner refuses to play genre-flashcard charades with you any more.