Dragon Forge is the first dragon game for which you need a calculator. And a lot of stamina, even as fans of building strategy.
What terms come to mind when you hear the word “dragon”? “Fire” certainly, also “destruction”, but not least equally a certain grace, an undoubtedly strong fascination that emanates from these mythical creatures, and above all: excitement. Thrill. Dragons are many things, but certainly not boring.
Dragon Forge is a building game from the developer Legend Studio that lets you slip into the role of one of these dragons. The game developer has already released several smaller titles, including the card game FreeCell Quest, which received 80% positive reviews on (Steam). A solid basis, then.
In the review, we explain why Dragon Forge fails to build on this and why even enthusiastic dragon and building fans should think twice about buying it.
Table of Contents
Kite making made easy
Your first order of business in Dragon Forge is to create your own dragon. In the editor, you can define the stature, colour and a few other details, although these are only of an optical nature. Afterwards, your freshly created quadruped hatches with flights from its egg and is immediately greeted by a ghost dragon that spits out some exposition:
Once the dragons fought against the demons, but lost this war. You are the last of your kind and are now supposed to free the land from an evil curse. That”s about it for the story, which really only provides a very rough framework and otherwise hardly plays a role.
After that, you are released into the world of Dragon Forge. You control your dragon from the top view with WASD and trigger attacks with the left mouse button. You can then use these to destroy bushes or rock formations, for example, which in turn drop items that you can collect and store in your inventory. You need food like strawberries to regenerate your life energy after fights, and you use wood and stones to make advanced items. So far, so familiar.
A strong economy is what the country needs
When exploring the actually beautifully designed world – there are forests, beaches, villages and a number of other sights to discover – you will, however, quickly come across a green mist that prevents you from moving forward. This is the aforementioned curse that weighs on the land and that you must remove. How? By earning masses of mana. This brings us to the economy section of Dragon Forge.
Once you have created a laboratory, it will continuously spit out gems. You must then bring them to an altar, where the coveted gems are converted into mana. You can also transport items manually, but it is best to use your goblin helpers for this. Near your starting position there is an NPC to whom you must hand over valuable items, which will unlock new minions.
You can then have them automatically run back and forth between your different buildings. This means that the automation principle of the Factorio brand has also found its way into Dragon Forge, even if the production chains in this game are not nearly as complex as in other genre representatives.
What Dragon Forge has to do with Greek poetry
In the top right corner you will not only see your total mana supply, but also how much you produce per second – very handy! You use your products to clear the aforementioned fog, which makes new building land accessible to you, which is extremely important.
Buildings need a flat surface to be erected, but the game world is very hilly. As a result, building processes often become tedious work and require a really pixel-perfect approach. It also doesn”t help that you can”t rotate buildings when placing them. These are fundamental basics that should actually be present in a building game.
But there is another use for your savings. At the eponymous Dragon Forge you unlock fables – the fables of the Greek poet Aesop, to be precise. Even if your German lessons may have left you with a different impression, fables can be quite an exciting subject.
The medium of video games also offers some interesting possibilities here: How about, for example, making ourselves an actor within the fables and letting us experience the moral of the story first hand? But no, Dragon Forge only presents us with a woodcut and some unadorned text windows – you might as well be reading a book.
This also applies to the rest of the game, by the way. Nothing is set to music, there is far too little music and the general sound design also leaves a lot to be desired. The incomplete German translation is also evident in the fables. The stories are entirely in English, and there are also gaps in other places. At least there are new crafting items for each unlocked fable, which keeps the progression going.
Daily greets the dragon beast
Once you”ve discovered these mechanics and got through them, however, the game becomes very, very repetitive. There are a total of 88 unlockable areas and 141 fables that require you to do basically the same thing every time – just with ever-increasing mana costs.
If you thought inflation was already a problem in real life, you”ve never played Dragon Forge! After just a few hours of play, you”ll be dealing with amounts in the billions, and the trend is rising fast. The game often no longer displays these figures in full, but only shows you that you have to spend 3.79E20 mana for the next area, for example. That is, a 3 with 20 zeros. This makes nothing you do feel grounded in any way, but just like blunt number juggling.
But you also have to know that your mana supply grows even when you”re not even in the game. Not to say Dragon Forge is fundamentally built around this mechanic. You”re supposed to log in periodically, do a few upgrades to make your buildings drop even more, and then quit the game.
Trick 17 for resourceful mana collectors
“Work smarter, not harder”, they say. If progress in Dragon Forge is too slow for you, know that the game uses your PC”s clock to calculate your offline earnings. Under “Date and Time” in your system settings, you can set the time a few days ahead. Voilà, your account is filled to the brim!
In the test, we had a lot of problems playing for more than 15 to 30 minutes at a time. There are still some challenges to complete in the game world, but they rank somewhere between “boring” and “badly designed”. During a race, for example, we have to pass several checkpoints, but some of them are in a dense forest where we can”t see anything at all. This is a pity, because it is quite fun to fly through the area with the dragon. Your character can also cover quite a distance vertically, but you have to watch out for your stamina.
Other than that, there are monsters to fight, which drop useful items and experience points that you can use to level up your dragon (more health points, more damage). The battles, however, unfortunately suffer from mediocre hit feedback. So Dragon Forge leaves us confused. Everything about this title screams “mobile game”. The passive earning of mana fits in well with mobile phone consumption habits, the weak presentation and shallow game depth would be in keeping with the quality standard there. Dragon Forge, on the other hand, can by no means keep up with the strong PC building competition. So it is better to stick to genre representatives without flying reptiles.
Editor”s verdict
I am extremely reluctant to be so harsh on small development studios and their projects. Now, however, it is my job to support you in your purchase decision, and in this role I must state clearly: I see no reason why I should recommend Dragon Forge to anyone. Certainly, the game is not necessarily bad, but it does almost nothing well and does an extremely large number of things mediocrely.
I also wonder what exactly the added value of some features is supposed to be. As a student of German and English, I am happy about the many fables built into the game, but does that make Dragon Forge tangibly better? Probably not. As a Free2Play title on my smartphone, I think the game would be fine, but on the PC I”ll have to advise you against it.
