The world of Dragonica Online is populated with painfully cute characters running around doing painfully cute things like fighting off cute wolf creatures, defending the realm, and having crazy little adventures. The one thing that skews this title differently than all other child themed Free-to-Play MMO’s out there is the side scrolling beat-em-up mechanics mixed in with a seemingly endless supply of quests. Not to say that the good dose of good old fashioned MMO addictiveness doesn’t help the game along either.
From the moment that Dragonica begins it isn’t like other free-to-play MMOs that try to steal small amounts of World of Warcraft’s success as the game itself doesn’t even play similarly. Dragonica mainly controls like the old style Streets of Rage games, where enemies casually walk onto screen and the player repeatedly strike them until they died. While this is a simple concept, the main curve is that this is all done with thousands of other people as well as the players’ character levels up and their powers evolve.
Quests help push the progress of the game, even though many of them are standard MMO fair of slaying a certain amount of monsters or gathering so many of a given item. These manage to provide the basic knowledge of the game and motivation to explore new areas, get better equipment, and move forward. But beyond the first couple of hours, they start to wear thin as many of the quests are almost carbon copies of previous ones and most of the story involved in them is unimpressive at best.
Dragonica does have fees, but only along the standard free-to-play model of having characters pay a fee to gain a certain perk or amazing weapon—both only for a set period of time. While this does seem to be more along the lines of other MMO’s with this pay structure, it does seem odd that some of the cosmetic changes, like clothes/armor, are also limited for a certain amount of time. The argument can be made that buying a better weapon with real world cash makes sense for it to disappear after an amount of time for balance issues, but the allotted time for costumes seems odd.
The game seems to be able to run on most computers that have been bought within the last couple of years. While the super deformed visual style does lend itself to looking good at the lower resolutions that the game displays, there isn’t really any higher end support at all for the game. Besides running at just above the basic resolution there is also no wide screen support either; be ready for black bars on the side of the screen.
Dragonica is by no means a bad game, although it could use some work to have wide screen support. At certain times the game managed to feel downright addictive. This does manage to be counteracted by the overly cute art style of the game; meaning that even when it is thought about long after a play session has ended the adorable dragon icon on the desktop thwarts most of those thoughts. Dragonica does have a way of destroying the better part of a night without warning, and is worth a download to try out.
Not As Good As: World of Warcraft
Also Try: Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online
Wait For It: The new Star Wars MMO
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