Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard

Take this review with a grain of salt, I played this game when I was young, so I have some initial bias for it. Ok so, this game is made by the same developers that made Battle Realms, Liquid Entertainment, so if you like that game, there's a strong chance you might like this game. There are major differences between this game and Battle Realms however. Here is a list of them. 1) No peasants to collect resources, that job belongs to your heroes and captains 2) Obviously, no rice paddies or horses to harvest, there are Dragonshards and Gold to get. You start out with a few Dragonshard nodes in the game that you can collect, but once they run out, you have to wait until it rains to get some more. 3) Captains cannot cross train in different training grounds, a unit is a unit, and that's final. 4) What i really like about the Captain system is that once you level up your individual Captains, they gain units in their platoon. 5) There is an underground area where you get most of your gold until you can construct more buildings, there are neutral mobs in here that are worth a lot of experience. That being said, that's mostly for the Skirmishes that were the highlight of this game and Battle Realms in my opinion. The story IS lacking, but that is no deterrent for some people, and I liked it well enough to complete it all the way through. This game can be a lot of fun if you invest time into it, but it can be terrible to people who haven't played Battle Realms before.

I have owned this game for some years now and was at no stage overly impressed with the campaign mode. Am yet to finish it and Don't think I will. In essence, I think the campaign mode was likely an afterthought to what was intended to play as an online head to head or team V team showdown. Thus it is the skirmish and online multi-player modes that earn it the 4 stars. Here is the real depth of play. Great graphics, Definite use of classic D&D monsters and abilities, Some good leveling up empowerment for most characters (10 or so to choose from for each race), a good range of offensive and defensive bonus items to find, and some very on edge intense battles where you either know your stuff and when to pause the game, or get wiped out - possibly making your opponent even stronger by giving them loads of XP for killing your characters. SKIRMISH MODE If you ban yourself from razing the enemies base, some in-depth strategy is required to win even a one on one match V the computer at Med AI level. Using the same rules but introducing a 2nd AI player at easy, and not even in alliance with the 1st AI opponent makes winning significantly more difficult. Spend too much time finding the med AI opponent (you can randomise your opponents race - they can even turn out to be the same as yours) and the other AI will in the meantime troll around underground developing a huge high level army. Likely they will come knocking on and over your base's doors before you finish with the other opponent. Too easy? - try a bigger map (more places for bases and mine access points) or even more AI players. Too Hard? - Pause the game and think. Use the Ranger's scouts to see potential threats and targets. The replays are great to watch and a great way to see how the AI opponent(s) operate. Here you can see all the mistakes you made and then can think of clever ways to beat it. Good Luck. See you 100s of hrs later. PS. It does take some time to become proficient with each race's troops.

I am going to talk only about the worst thing about this game. In every mission, you can get "reward points", which is a currency for buying upgrades for your main heroes. You get these points for fulfilling specific objectives and not exceeding certain limitaions. Problem 1 - you can't see these objectives until after you've finished the mission. Completely nonsensical and it basically forces you to play every mission twice to have a chance at acquiring a decent amount of points. This ties into the: Problem 2 - the progress gets saved immediately and is irreversible through loading. Example: You make a save at the end of a mission, finish it, buy an upgrade for a hero only to find out it's useless, you load the game, finish the mission again aaaand... the upgrade is already purchased even though you loaded a save game. It also allows you to infinitely farm items, ruining any sense of progression. Problem 3 -This basically shoehorns you into using only one of the 4 available heroes because you dump all the reward points on him/her. The moment I stopped playing was when I completed a mission, chose 3 items to take with me to the start of the next one. Saw that it was a bad idea and loaded a save in the previous mission, only to find out that those 3 items are gone forever even if I load a save from the previous mission.... Anybody who though this was a good idea should be lynched. If you want it to make sense, you would have to first play through the mission, find out what stupid arbitrary "play this stupid to get rewarded" (like recruit 3 units max or use only 300 resources etc.) objectives you missed, spend NO points at all, play through the mission AGAIN and only then decide what to buy. With the knowledge that anything you do buy, you are stuck with for good. A solution would probably be to backup the save files and only then try out anything but this game isn't worth the time. Game seemed fine, shame it's ruined by the save system....

I bought this game outside GoG ages ago on some sale. It looked pretty cool and I love D&D. Was also interested in seeing how implementing D&D mechanics in RTS turns out. It turned out just OK... its kinda fun low-scale RTS with some RPG elements. A light game that is fun to play, but do not expect much. D&D is there, but it doesn't do that much "oh hey, those clerics use actual Cure Light Wounds! Cool.". The only really original thing is economy - resources sometimes drop from the sky as "shard rain" and everyone drops everything to run and collect them. Also dark elves seem super-cool, but there is no campaign for them :/ Thing game would be more memorable if they had add it.

D&D: Dragonshard came out in a time in which good and excellent real time strategy games were not rare. It was hard to gain some success if you had to compete with games like Warcraft III, Homeworld, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Starcraft, and so on. So, it's not strange that Dragonshard has been completely forgotten. But, I have to say, this game is pretty solid. The Underworld dungeons are a neat addition to the core mechanics, and they succeed in giving to Dragonshard its own identity as a real time strategy game. There are two campaigns, and they are not long, but they are solid and fun. I have to say, I don't like the fact that you can't build your buildings outside of a grid, but, apart from that, I think this is a must play if you want a good, old strategy game. Bonus point because I am tired of the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron is a way more interesting setting. Nice.