Cool role playing game, but where the dragons at?
I am a nerd. I admit it, so when you add dragon to a title, it immediately shoots up on my cool list, but Dragons of Atlantis doesn’t have much dragons. In fact, after several hours of playing, I still did not know the full extent of the dragon’s purpose.
The civilization of Atlantis is about to fall into the ocean and disappear forever into legend, but four Atlantean tribes must compete to become the one that will shape the future of humanity. The key to winning is…queue appropriate suspenseful music…The Dragons of Atlantis.
Players choose one of the four tribes to represent and then are given the standard city to build and expand. In most ways, Dragons of Atlantis plays like Kingdoms of Camelot, but includes fantasy elements such as the dragons, minotaurs, giants, etc.
It has a three view setup: city, field and the world map. The city is the area inside the walls and is where the fortress is, where players train troops, learn science and house the population. The field is where the lumber, mining, quarrying and farming areas exist and the map is where the players conquers wilderness, other cities and expand into new towns.
Players use the resources from the fields to build and improve the city and the dragons. There are two main areas where the dragons come into play. The first is the dragon’s keep. This is where the city dragon is hatched and raised.
As players increase the level of the keep, the dragon gets bigger and more powerful, which I believe adds to the attack and defense of the city. I am not 100 percent sure because after playing it for several days, I still don’t really know what they purpose of the dragon and the keep is.
The other area is players can have dragons as troops to use in defense of the city and in conquering neighboring lands. It takes a long time before players can earn those troops, so don’t expect a dragon army in the first few days.
The game also uses the same kind of quest system as Kingdoms of Camelot, where players build up their kingdom in a certain order and earn rewards in the form of resources and gold.
The graphics of the game are on par with Kingdoms of Camelot, but with one added feature that makes it stand out. When players hatch their dragon, the city screen has an animated graphic of the dragon in the keep. It’s pretty cool to see the dragon spread his wings.
Overall, Dragons of Atlantis puts a nice spin on the Kingdoms of Camelot formula. The fantasy aspects make it more interesting for people like me who got bored with Kingdoms of Camelot and kept my interest. Many of the fantasy elements have Kingdoms of Camelot equivalents, but the pictures were much more awesome.
I wish there had been more of a dragon element to the game. I was hoping training and hatching a dragon would have more of an impact instead as a peripheral element. Other than the occasional upgrade, players spend the majority of the beginning upgrading their resource centers, building garrisons, etc. just like Kingdoms of Camelot.
Dragons of Atlantis won’t sink into oblivion likes its counterpart, but it will need to continue to work on separating itself from similar games in the genre. I plan on continuing playing for a while more, but if it wants to keep my interest the dragons are going to need to play a much larger part.