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Fight The Dragon
PC (Steam)
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone… Tough Luck!
3/5 stars
“Fight the Dragon” is the latest game by Australia-based Indie developer 3 Sprockets. Promising the combined loot whoring of the ‘Diablo’ franchise and customization of the ‘LittleBigPlanet’ franchise, “Fight the Dragon” really piqued my interest. I was curious to see how an Indie developer would handle these two gameplay mechanics alone, and even more curious to see what would result from putting them together.
Presentation
“Fight the Dragon” isn’t a particularly impressive game in any aspect of its presentation. While the engine is based on 3D polygons, the aesthetic of the graphics it creates seems to be heavily influenced by “Minecraft.” Characters and enemies aren’t quite as blocky as “Minecraft’s” denizens, but they don’t look particularly good or impressive. Environments can contain non-blocky objects, but none of them are anything amazing.
The soundtrack is incredibly forgettable, and there are only a handful of tunes that all play very quietly in the background. Sound effects are adequate, but again, not terribly memorable. One major sound oversight is that the sound of a dying female bandit enemy sounds exactly like the sound of a dying female player character, which can be confusing in the middle of a huge, messy battle.
“Fight the Dragon” is reasonably solid technically, and 3 Sprockets should be praised for their responsiveness to issues posted in the game’s Steam forum. However, the game does not use particularly clean net code, which results in massive lag spikes whenever a player joins a networked game and three such lag spikes at the beginning of every full-party adventure, as each character loads into the stage. This can be particularly troublesome in stages that start out with combat at the start point. I also ran into a significant glitch where using a Steam controller with force feedback (rumble) enabled caused the game to lag out from 60 frames per second to 6 seconds per frame whenever someone on my team used a special attack. 3 Sprockets fixed it, but the fact that something this basic was able to slip past their QA team is a problem.
Story
Ugh.
I’m not a fan of user-generated content in general. It is usually terrible, unbalanced, amateurish, or just flat-out stupid. I was hoping that “Fight the Dragon” would be a bit like “LittleBigPlanet” and include a satisfying amount of content created by 3 Sprockets themselves. Unfortunately, there is no campaign mode, and there is no story – not even a platformer-quality excuse narrative – to tie the game’s activities to something meaningful. It’s just an adventurer (or four) going on adventures of wildly variable quality in an attempt to become powerful enough to fight the dragon boss.
Fighting the titular dragon isn’t even tied to any sort of narrative materials. He’s just there, and players are just supposed to fight him. Because reasons.
Gameplay
As a ‘Diablo’ clone, “Fight the Dragon” is adequate, but not spectacular. As a ‘LittleBigPlanet’ style Play/Create/Share game, “Fight the Dragon” is limited. The game also suffers from sometimes-unresponsive controls and some truly terrible ‘Zelda’-style auto-jumping, which makes stages based around jumping puzzles an absolute nightmare. In general, doing anything in the game feels clunky, even with an Xinput controller, and the combat absolutely pales in comparison to “Diablo 3.”
Playing stages amounts to adding them to a big map that shows blank squares around the player’s home base (a hut). Each square can contain an adventure or campaign (a series of several adventures) downloaded from the Internet. 3 Sprockets did provide a handful of stages, and picking a random stage to add to the map early on will always pick a 3 Sprockets stage… until it runs out of them after about 5 adventures. From then on, the only content available is user-generated content.
The action plays out from an isometric angle with a fully rotatable camera. Players can run around, attack with one of two equipped weapons, and use special abilities by building up a mana-like resource that has a different name for every class but is functionally identical among the classes. The classes in “Fight the Dragon” are the bog standard Fighter, the Ice Wizard, the Fire Lord, and the Black Rogue. Spellcasters seem very underpowered in “Fight the Dragon,” and it seems that the Fighter finally has an opportunity to be the ‘best’ class… but only for normal adventures! The Black Rogue is the only class that actually does well against the titular dragon thanks to a stealth ability and exclusive access to the highest rate-of-fire ranged weapons in the game.
Fighting enemies and opening chests during adventures produces potions and loot. Potions can be carried for the duration of the current adventure (up to 10 health and 10 mana potions at once), while loot is gathered into the character’s bag for later consideration. In the home base hub, there is a thing called the Loot Shrine which allows players to donate their unwanted loot in order to build up a meter before offering a prayer. Praying when the meter is completely full is guaranteed to provide the player with something good, such as a bonus stat point to distribute among Strength, Defense, Luck, and Endurance; or perhaps a flat bonus of +5 Health or Stamina (the latter being used for running and performing heavy attacks).
Perhaps the best part of “Fight the Dragon’s” loot system is that every 8 hours of real time, 6 random stages are chosen for Bonus Rewards, granting 20% more experience and 20% better loot drops. Essentially, Bonus Rewards act as a ‘Diablo’-style equivalent of MMORPGs’ Daily Quests.
The weird thing about “Fight the Dragon’s” user-generated stages is that the game actively takes a lot of customization options out of the stage-designer’s hands. Enemy health and special abilities cannot be manually assigned; the designer must simply designate certain monsters as ‘stronger’ or ‘weaker’ than normal, or point out monsters that should be more prone to develop a special ability… at random. Enemy health always scales based on the level of the characters playing stages, as does the amount of loot produced by treasure chests.
Outside of monsters and loot (the main reasons to even play a Hack ‘n Slash), though, stage designers have complete freedom to come up with whatever they want… provided they don’t want to create grinding, level-boosting, lootsplosion stages, as 3 Sprockets has a written policy for removing those. There are a number of logic objects that can be tied together in order to trigger events and each stage can contain an incredibly large amount of stuff, so stages can be fairly complex from a mechanical standpoint. But opening doors with keys and killing hordes of monsters gets old fairly quickly, and since the only way to gain experience and loot is by killing hordes of monsters, the more story-based user-generated stages actively waste the player’s time.
Playing as a group seems almost essential in “Fight the Dragon,” as harder stages (with better loot and more experience to gain) are very tedious if not impossible to solo most of the time, especially at higher character levels when enemies start to become damage sponges. Unfortunately, getting a great team together (I don’t know if the MJ Crew qualifies) and grinding up to the level cap of 60 ultimately amounts to nothing as the fight against the titular dragon – the way to determine when one is ‘done’ with the game – is a solo-only experience. Fortunately, the dragon, with his 1 million hit points, never recovers health, and the player is free to whittle away at him over and over until he’s dead. The only thing preventing a persistent level 1 player from killing the dragon right off the bat is the fact that facing him in his arena requires a Dragon Scroll as an entry ticket… and players earn 1 Dragon Scroll for completing each stage. It is also noteworthy that the dragon battle completely ignores standard gameplay mechanics, such as fire resistance and defense, in favor of a ‘balanced’ percentage-based system that sees the dragon’s damage to and from players remain fairly static, regardless of character level. Numerous players have asked 3 Sprockets to patch the game with an update that makes the dragon fight co-op as well, but they have flat-out refused, saying it would require a complete overhaul of the fight and be too much work.
Overall
“Fight the Dragon” is a fairly unique take on the Hack ‘n Slash RPG genre with its heavy focus on user-generated content. As someone who isn’t in love with Hack ‘n Slash RPGs OR user-generated content, I found that “Fight the Dragon” wore out its welcome long before I’d reached the level cap or fought the dragon. Creating stages is reasonable interesting though, but with the small player pool nobody is going to make it famous by designing stages in this game.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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