Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm for Dreamcast Review

The Story

The Dragon Lord has reclaimed the land as his own and threatens everyone with an unholy pestilence. Then he goes and takes command of a flying castle that spreads the horrible disease. You play one of two characters destined to stop the Dragon Lord. Cynric is a warrior that is deadly with a sword and has minimal magic abilities. Aeowyn is a sorceress with superb spellcraft skills, though also adept with a short sword.

The Gameplay

The presentation of the mission objectives play out like a military game (Ghost Recon or Socom) but with a fantasy twist. You are given a lengthy description of the current situation (with fine narration) and told what you have to do. Then you’re plopped down at the beginning of the level and off you go.

Pretty all you do is walk around the level looking for enemies, keys, and people you’re suppose to rendezvous with. You also need to look for the different Earth Runes that are needed to take down the floating castle. Each area has one piece of the Earth Rune. That’s all you really do.

Luckily, the enemies are plentiful and vary in strength, but they all have one thing in common: they aren’t that easy to beat. Their voices are high-pitched and sound like Gilbert Godfrey sucking helium. In a fight, they mean business. The foes block and dodge and strafe around you like seasoned war pros. Even the first Kruls (wolf-looking bi-ped thingies) I thought would be training enemies, but they managed to deplete my hit points to half. And boy was I angry.

The Controls

It takes a while to get use to the controls of Draconus because the analog stick is used often. Besides moving, when you hit the ‘X’ button and join it with a moving on the analog stick, it creates attacking combo of up to 4 hits. You can just hit ‘X’ repeatedly, but when you get to tough foes, you’ll want the power of some of the other hits. To do that you'd better get used to the analog stick in attacking. What really worked were the strafing shoulder buttons. The left shoulder button strafed left as you moved and right button strafed right (go figure). The movement was smooth and felt good after a while, since I was use to strafing with the X and B buttons on many Dreamcast first person shooters.

The Graphics

Easily the worst part of the game. Faces on the characters are blurry, like they tried to take photographs of real people and scanned them in at 1/4 the quality. The outdoor landscapes look like very first generation PC 3D graphics. Trees are flat, grass and bushes (or what I thought were bushes) were terribly angled and when you walked through them, your character just disappeared. Maybe it had some bad collision detection.

The one upside were the interior level designs. Though drab in atmosphere they weren't as badly drawn as the outdoors. Stone was stone, fire was fire, and wooden doors were wooden doors.

Thompson’s Two Cents

I know this game came out the first year the Dreamcast did, but there could have been more polishing of the graphics. But the nice story and replay value gives the game some redemption. Action/adventure fans will probably like this game or those interested in fantasy games. I mean, they even spelled Wyrm with a ‘y’.