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Drakengard
The next instalment in
the Drakengard saga is here and fans of the series will be more than
happy. Taking place about 18 years after the first Drakengard, this game
tells the story of Nowe, a youngling raised by dragons (as you do) to
save the world from peril.
The story takes in the raising on Nowe and his
eventual discovery by the Knights of the Seal whose responsibility it is
to see that the Red Dragon never breaks the magical seals that hold him
in place. Nowe joins the Knights but after finding out that all is not
as it seems and strikes out on his own to find out the truth of the
whole matter.
There are two key components to the game, and they
are the land and air battles. Battling on the land will give you access
to the entire team that Nowe eventually assembles, though you can only
use one of them at a time for a good old fashioned hack n slash. Each
character has their own weapon type and is useful against certain
enemies.
The games plays out almost like a book with each
separate chapters breaking up the way that the tale is told. My
favourite element to the game was taking to the air on dragon back and
although some parts of the airborne fighting are somewhat cumbersome,
the overall feeling of being in the air is a lot of fun, plus remember
you are on a dragon!
Graphically the title won’t bring you tears of joy,
but it certainly won’t let you down either. It does the job. The colours
look a little dimished at times but it’s a more the fault that we are
spoiled with more powerful machines now such as the XBox and XBox 360 to
see what is possible with graphics on a console. When taking part in
large scale combat, I did notice that the frame took a fair hit at
times, never rendering it unplayable, but certainly upping the annoyance
level as when on dragonback it’s hard at times to get a good lock on
enemies as it is without the added aggravation of a framedrop.
As you play the game, your characters will build up
in experience points and through experience become more powerful. This
is something that happens automatically and can’t be controlled by you
the player.
Something to bear in mind when battling your way
through this title is to be very careful. The missions are lengthy,
complicated and to make matters worse, just like the first game, there
are no checkpoints to pull you out of any mess you might encounter or
die in mid mission. I simply don’t understand why games developers don’t
think about this, or more importantly why their testing teams don’t
bring it up, which would sometimes suggest that a game isn’t played in
it’s entirety before being distributed. To have to replay a 20 plus
minute mission over and over just makes you put down the game and forget
about it.
All
things said and done if you are a fan of the series then you are going
to enjoy this one too. Improvements have been made on the original with
the exception of the dated appearance of the graphics. The game is old
fashioned hack and slash fun with a bit of story thrown in for good
measure. Give it a rent and see what you think, then go buy it if.
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