Fate of the Dragon

The Good
Another historical Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga. Always loved historical series, since your learning history the fun way: playing the game.

Fate of the Dragon introduced various new concepts that even I admit are worth some recognition.

They introduced a "city within a city" concept in a 3D perspective. Most modern strategy games only have one massive interface like Age of Empires. Fate of the Dragon introduces two interfaces. The adventure map and the city map, both real-time.

I applaud their approach on the RPG-style characteristics of the heroes, they have stats and skills, consisting of combat skills, chinese sorcery and other traits. This strategy game, is similiar to other strategy games, which manage their towns, people, troops, etc, introducing new units specified on China in that period of time. The heroes here fight as single units that fight like gods, so its like watching your basic Hong Kong Kungfu Action film, in a way.

The Bad
Although this game introduced a lot of new features, that as I said are worth some recognition, you get the feels that's its just another Age of Empires clone but only worse. The game itself is to focused on the graphics which I say are rather beautiful, but as I say if you focus on one thing, you lose attention to the other. And what is that other? Gameplay. No, it's not slow, the battles aren't bad, but the fact that your units (or was it heroes) can starve to death on the adventure map, kinda takes the fun out of exploring. The "pressure" of time gives it all away. Like playing Command and Conquer but with a time limit, you do not get "maximum satisfaction".

That alone kinda put me off continuing the game, and by the way the campaign sucks big time. The tutorial itself was much harder. I'll probably end it by saying the makers of this game are probably to concerned with the market than the game itself. And as usual when that happens, serious gamers like myself and many other veteran gamers in Mobygames can just say sigh.

The Bottom Line
Not worth the unless extreamly rich or bored.

My rating for the game:

Graphics: B Music: B- (can't actually remember though...) Gameplay: D

Overall rating: C-