Dragons and Titans Review

Developer: Wyrmbyte
Publisher: Versus Evil 
Review Platform: Mac (Steam)
Review Copy Provided By: Versus Evil 
Release Date: March 12, 2014

Ugh.

I really wasn’t looking forward to writing this review. I really feel that there are so many better things I could be doing right now than writing this review. I feel that the few of you who were interested enough to get Dragons and Titans already picked it up. Those of you who didn’t have no reason to. If you wanted to play a MOBA that you knew had a long life and great balance, you’d play League of Legends. In fact, if you play MOBAs at all, there’s an 89% chance that you already are playing it. I can only guess that the other 11% are playing DOTA 2. Or anything else. Not Dragons and Titans.

Note that I’m not saying the game sucks. Far from it. The game even makes some major improvements over its brethren. The biggest one has to be using the Shift-Key to move, rather than right clicking. By letting me hold down a key to move, the game quickly eliminated most of the carpel-tunnel associated with MOBAs or strategy games. It doesn’t always work incredibly smoothly, but it does simulate gliding far better than clicking simulates walking. By streamlining movement, strategizing becomes far more important, utilizing each dragons individual strengths.

And this is where my biggest complaint with the game lies. Despite being called “Dragons and Titans“, the game centers solely on dragons. This forces me to make a new rule – How cool a dragon is inversely proportional to how many there are. In a game like, I don’t know, off the top of my head, League of Legends, that takes all sorts of characters and creatures and pits them against each other, a dragon will be badass, because we have to see him in comparison to everyone else. In Dragons and Titans, however, everyone has a dragon, and because everyone has a dragon and all the characters are dragons, dragons stop being cool.

The good people at Wyrmbyte tried to fix this by adding some customizable aspects, namely, weapons. As well as a dragon, every player chooses a weapon as well. The weapon can make up for the dragons weaknesses, or amplify their strengths, which adds a nice little touch of strategy. Unfortunately though, this means that each dragon has only three abilities, and each weapon has two abilities, as opposed to the five abilities found in characters in League of Legends.

I know I shouldn’t be comparing it to League of Legends so much, that I should be seeing whether or not it stands up on its own as a game. But when both games are Free-to-Play, and one has been such a cultural and commercial and cultural success, the other game needs to really shake things up, like Smite did (if you haven’t played Smite, play Smite. Smite’s awesome). If the game can’t offer anything really new or exciting, it has no reason to exist. And no matter how pretty, how well it plays, or how competent it is, it will always come in second.