This free to play 3D side-scrolling MMORPG from THQ ICE had its grand opening on October 15th. Dragonica Online also its players to choose one of four character job classes: Warrior, Magician, Archer, or Thief. Each gender has 10 different hairstyles, 21 different hair colors, and 10 different face and eye styles. As the game progresses, characters gain levels and learn new attacks. Each job class has two different paths to choose for advancing combat styles, giving the freedom to create a character that is all your own. Each class has its own armor and weapons. Changing armor shows and is customizable to give the characters their own style. Up to four different characters can be made per account, allowing for even more fun and continued game play.
Because it’s Halloween, the four main towns of Odellia, are decorated for the occasion. There are even cardboard cut-outs where the characters can stand behind and put their faces in the holes. There are jack-o-lanterns everywhere you look and there are even players who have costumes running around in the game.
There are 10 active channels allowing for less crowding per server, and each server tells how crowded it is. This helps prevent the slowing down and lagged effects that are common occurrences for online gaming.
The game controls are mostly set up for QWERTY keyboard use,trying to keep mouse use at a minimum. There are times though when the key that is supposed to be pushed doesn’t work and it gets frustrating when trying to do something quickly. Another problem with the keyboard default settings is that it is too easy to get stuck in the text box. It is really hard to get out of the text box sometimes too. The latest update fixed that, so now it is as easy as hitting Enter on the keyboard.
There is a strange little blue dragon-like thing that follows your character around and helps you learn how to play the game. The problem with it is that by the time it tells you how to do most of the things that are important to playing through the game, you have already figured it out through exploration of your own. It gets really annoying also, when NPC characters you have already talked to and gotten the information about certain features of the game from repeat themselves. There is one NPC, Alvin the Hermit, in particular that tries to explain Friend Points every time you go to exchange your Friend Points for experience. Obviously you know what they are if you are exchanging them already.
Setting up a party for you and your friends is easy in this
Combat is a bit on the difficult side. There is not as much maneuverability on the Mission Maps, as there is in the towns. On the Mission Maps, characters can only more diagonally, left, right, up and down, but can only face left or right. This makes it difficult to fight monsters, which can move diagonally, left, right, up, and down as well. In towns, characters can more this freely, but when it really matters, when monsters are coming at you from north or south, you have to move past them or step backwards, in order to get on the same plan as the monsters and be able toattack them. It is really difficult to fight a monster that is north or south of your character since you can’t face your character in that direction.
The monsters re-spawn very, very quickly, so if there aren’t many people around at the same hunting ground it can become slightly overwhelming, but if there are a bunch of people, it makes it nice that there isn’t a lot of waiting around for more monsters to appear.
Another perk to Dragonica, is that while completing missions that require a dungeon and have a boss battle, only you and other people in your party can enter. So there isn’t any way that other online players can come in and steal your kills and dungeon boss experience. That seems to be a problem with other MMOs. There are countless problems with online players coming in at the end of a quest and taking the kill and loot for themselves, while you and your party did all the work.
Overall, Dragonica is a pretty fun game. It has a large online community and has a forum. The customer support is easy to access and there are always special events going on in the game. There is still some work to be done with the game, but THQ ICE seems to be working fast to get all the kinks and bugs out of the game.
I recommend that if you are looking for a fun game that you can put hours into and can pick up at any time, that you should give this game a shot.
Just so everyone knows, the two spots where the words should have a space between them, I know about them, but if I put the space there, the paragraphs get all messed up. I am so serious that two little spacings mess up all of the other paragraphs that it isn't even funny and it kind of makes me mad.
ReplyDeleteWhile comprised of mere words, this review provides a good feel for the game in question. I'm not even sure if the lone image above was even needed, given how well you described the game's setting and its various aspects. The review itself is more of an overall gloss on the game, rather than providing substantial detail, but this doesn't make the review any less than solid work. It isn't often that I develop any MMORPG interest, and now I'm afraid that reading your review has done just that.
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