Dawn of The Dragons

Dawn of the Dragons.

All right, now it’s time to review a game that I’ve been spending a good bit of time playing. It’s called Dawn of the Dragons.
Now, the basic parts of the game is a standard Mafia Wars knock-off. You use energy to do quests, wait for energy to rinse and recharge, and repeat. What’s nice, however, is the equipment, PVP, and “Raids” you can do. Raids allow you to face bosses again, except the bosses are uber-charged, and it takes an entire party of a hundred people days to blast them. This would normally be annoying, and in other games it is. However, thanks to being tied to Kongregate’s chat, and having some NICE systems for getting people to join…it’s instead an absolute pleasure. And, even low-levels can hop onto a raid, and blast the monster. I’ve NEVER seen a raid run out of time to kill a monster. It provides a great way to use Stamina/Honor, which is normally only used in PVP. And, raids are useful, helping you get unique equipment, extra gold, and other neat stuff. Each item you get has a story behind it, with at least a paragraph of text, and amusing, genuinely fun text at that.
That’s actually the main strength of this game. While the gameplay and such is just a standard rip-off of Mafia Wars, the story is genuinely interesting. Instead of merely hinting at something awesome happening, each quest has a paragraph, or even a couple of pages of text, explaining the awesome stuff you do. Instead of having a quest entitled “Slay an army of thousands single-handily”, the quest explains how the player faces an army of thousands, looks at them, and charges, cleaving through them one by one, sweat pouring off your brow, arms growing weary, but still fighting. And then, at the end, realizing there’s no one left to fight. You’ve won.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the text. It also helps that the game actually has NPCs, who appear in the story, have characterization, banter with you, and all in all are fun. Seeing your character interact with each of them is darn fun. Seeing the scholar realize that he just accidentally insulted you is genuinely funny, one guy getting stuck in a graveyard is worth a laugh, and there’s more.
In addition, the minor mechanics work well. Leveling up recharges your stats, and especially early on, quests are enough to level. It still has the standard issue where Energy is the ‘god-stat’, since energy determineshow much you can quest, and questing determines a large amount of the XP you can get, in addition to being where the meat of the story is. Doing quests unlocks better weapons and armor, which helps with raids and PVP, and even unlocks better raids. Though, you can still do higher-level raids you haven’t unlocked, simply by following a Rallying Cry in the chat, which is how I got a large amount of high-level items.
Unfortunately, energy does begin to become less useful, thanks to quests requiring multiple trys to win, and due to quest energy requirements increasing. It’s better then Mafia Wars or Knights of the Crystal, though, since once the game kicks off, the energy requirements and your energy level increase at the same rate. You end up needing to wait a bit for energy to recharge, though. Fortunately, there’s PVP and Raids, which are genuinely fun.

There are four different types of PVP conflicts, each allowing you to use different equipment set-ups, and two of them even making a big deal about how many Friends you have tied to the account. Again, unlike Facebook games, there are MUCH better systems for getting Friends inside the game. I got a huge amount of friends just by going to the chatroom, and friending everyone who was already playing the game. So, instead of
bothering people who just want to connect with friends, you talk to people already playing the game, who genuinely want to meet new people inside it.