Dragonshard fails to make the most of its ambitious ideas to reinvent the RTS genre. Great concept, poor implementation.
The game revolves around the creation of units calls captains, which act as automatic soldier generators. Your captains start out at level 1, and as you kill enemy units, you gain global experience. This experience can be spent at the various captain generating buildings to raise the level of all respective captains generated by that building type. This is retroactive, existing captains are upgraded, and all future captains of that type get the level bonus as well. That level bonus enables the captains to start to recruit following, mini-units that act as smaller versions of the captain. Supposedly the followers also give the captains higher damage and health ratings. Unfortunately, it all breaks down right there. For one, it is virtually impossible to tell which unit out of the four or five in a cluster is your captain, because they all resemble each other. Every captain has multiple abilities, some of which center around the captain, and properly placing them is practically impossible. Kohan at least had a graphical icon to represent the whole unit that you could click on, and the captains were visually distinct. Dragonshard gives you no such convenience. Kohan also removed direct control of your company once it engaged in combat, but Dragonshard still lets you directly control the unit, which means micromanagement becomes an issue.
The other problem is the role-playing and RTS aspects of the game do not mix well together. The first three missions served as a tutorial to the various game mechanics. The game does a poor job of informing the player exactly how and when each method of playing game is appropriate. I failed several times trying to raise an army when the appropriate solution was to explore the underworld in RPG mode and collect this totally unhinted artifact of immense power. The other time I tried to explore the underworld, I was crushed because it was really optional, and the main threat was the lizardman army. Many of the abilities given to the champions in the game are unimaginative, and some are completely overpowered (in particular, the champions that give a +15% bonus to damage for all units are undeniably out of whack). The upgrades and items that each champion can get are also unimaginative, every champion has three identical upgrades (one that makes their attacks area-effect, another that increases the attack speed, and a last one that vastly increases their damage). The RPG aspect of the game seems very poorly thought out, and does not really do the vast fantasy resource of Dungeons and Dragons justice.
The production values of the game are decent, and the voice acting is tolerable. Sometimes the units sound good, other times you can detect that the voice actors are less than into it. In particular, the voice actress for Lady Marynn reminds me of the voice actor who played Lady Aribeth in Never Winter Nights, although I could not confirm this. Technically, the game is still laden with bugs. I managed to crash the game twice in four hours on a state of the art platform (P4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, PCI-X ATI RADEON X800), even after patching with an update that promises to remove "many" of the glitches. The game is also an incredible resource hog, most inter-army battles slowed down my machine to a crawl, even at lowered resolutions such as 1280x960.
While the ideas behind Dragonshard have promise, the execution by Atari leaves much to be desired.