Divinity: Dragon Commander

Divinity: Dragon Commander is a bizarre mash-up of Total War, Bioware RPG, tabletop wargame, shooter, and political simulation, with just enough Divinity to justify marketing it as a title in that series. Despite the setting having a reasonably diverse assortment of races and classes, the RTS uses completely generic units with a steampunk theme that could have been dropped into many settings with essentially no changes required. I would not be surprised to learn it had been coopted from a never-released title. The highlight of the RTS combat is the jetpack-wearing dragon your character turns into. Using shooter mechanics, you can launch your fiery breath at your enemies or slot abilities that aid your RTS units. Your enemies will fire homing projectiles back at you, requiring you to dodge to avoid taking damage. The dragon trivializes many of the small-scale battles early in campaign mode. Later on, the battles become so unwieldy that building up a superior force and auto-resolving them will save you the hassle of dealing with the mediocre RTS play. If you are triggered by political opinions on either side of the spectrum, then you should probably pass on this one. In the RPG/political phase, the player's generals and advisors are a panoply of blatant stereotypes asking him to rule on issues such as gay marriage, the wage gap, legalization of marijuana, genetically modified food, and so on. The player's choices alter his reputation with the game's races or grant cards that can affect the strategic side of the game. RPG fans are constantly asking for games to include moral choices that have a meaningful impact, and it's almost as if Larian was like, "Here, this is what you said you wanted!" Having bought it on sale, I wasn't upset that I played through the campaign once. Despite it's flaws, I didn't find it without merit. The voiceovers are very seriously A+ good, and the effort-reward mechanism is there. There's potential, but it's disappointingly unrealized.

Pros: - The graphics and voice acting are great. In the different points of view, the music and look make it feel very real. The strategic map looks like a Risk-ish board game; the tactical mode is a little like the first Command and Conquer, but you can tell what the units are based on the unique look of each unit. - The selling points for me: you get to be a dragon! (I loved the dragon-knight of Ego-Draconis) and multiplayer gaming. - You can focus your research to tailor your units or dragon (they share a research pool) to your gameplay. Cons: - The combat is boring. It becomes extremely repetitive after a few battles. Multiplayer does not even make it much more interesting. - The units all have "strong against" and "weak against" characteristics, making it a rock, paper, scissors game of numbers. Magic helps a little for this, but not overwhelmingly. - The overall effects of diplomacy are pretty minimal, and the problems the diplomats fight over are reminiscent of a high-school student body. You can change your favor with a population for an unholy price, however... - The dragon form is impossible to control. The dragon simply does not respond to your attempts to drive it, and it is too fragile to not be nimble. If you DO get it to respond for a few seconds, it is devastatingly powerful, but it acts like your commands to the dragon are going to it across a 2,400 baud modem. There is nothing about this game that makes it shine. It leans heavily on the laurels of its namesake.

To put it bluntly the rts of the game is nothing amazing, it reminds me of the old rise of nations games with steampunk like troppers. The drangon transformation in combat kinda brakes the battle sections too however where the game really shines is its empire micro managment. Do you want to allow gay marrage well if you do the elves and lizard people will adore you but your undead and dwarf subjects will despise you, the imps don't care it seems. How about forced conscription, should you allow freedom of religion? These are the many choices you have to face in the game and no matter what you do you will piss someone off but its up to you to rule how you see fit and try and keep the support of the differnt people you rule. The ambassadors and generals you interact with are what make this game, so set it to easy and just mass tanks and let the ai deal with the conquering as you rule the land as a benevalent king or crule bastard.

I've played like 3 hours in the solo Campaign and I had : -a bug where i can't recruit troops in RTS battle -a systematic crash during certain battle Which is already somewhat bad... But the aggraving factor is that it's impossible to save during the bugged RTS battle, which make every crash a huge loss of time. It's not really an acceptable state for the game... which is sad because i'm sure there is at least a "passable" game hidden behind the bugs and problems

I mean exactly what I said, it's a strange mix of ideas. But they mostly work, only have one complaint that I'll address first. Politics: It's all black and white and mostly pulled from today's political scene. No middle ground even when both extremes are clearly foolish. Could have used more thought. Now on to the good stuff. The hub (your ship) is relatively well done, beautifully detailed and fairly well thought out. The characters found within are rather one dimensional except for your generals who have some depth. Not much, but some. The tactical battles are fairly straightforward, rush to get resources, fight a couple small skirmishes, and gear up for the slugging match... Throwing your dragon-self into the mix enables you to augment your forces in MANY ways, and when done properly can make them nearly unstoppable. However it denies you the ability to continue delivering construction/production orders... A tradeoff I think they intended. And now to the Strategy portion of the game, where you maneuver forces, build facilities and armies and where you REALLY need to out think your opponents. Not so simple when they're perfectly capable and willing to outflank your advance to tear at your soft underbelly. My advice, watch your enemies (plural) very carefully. Very heartily approve of the game and it's unorthodox styling. Maybe it'll shake a few more developers out of the fog of cookie cutter crap that's usually produced.