A standard RTS - there's really no role playing involved.
User Rating: 5.6 | Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard PC
This game follows a disappointing trend to remove control from the player that I first noticed while playing Dungeon Siege. The ai of your 'characters', in this case your army's captains, handles the combat and spell casting, (you can't issue orders while paused so you pretty much have to leave combat up to the ai, especially when you control more than a handful of units) so you are left to do other things. Unfortunately those other things amount to clicking on the ground to move your party around small, linear maps, clicking on treasure items and other resources to pick them up (I am amazed that game designers think clicking on a pile of gold is one of the elements of 'playing' these so-called 'games'. I guess if it were automated there would be even less to do) and building your base. Building the base is the standard routine, which amounts to choosing what kind of units you want by building appropriate buildings. There are some other elements intended to flesh this out, like having the option to level up units but there isn't any depth to it. The strongholds are composed of a grid of pre-determined building locations, exactly like in Battle for Middle Earth. Its been a long time since the layout of a stronghold has actually meant anything to game play (the last one I played was Dungeon Keeper 2, and that’s pretty old now) so the designers have decided to remove it as a factor, but it simply serves to highlight just how little thought goes into building an army in this game. The process is wrote, with a few token choices along the way. Which is pretty much how you could describe the linear level design as well. I also couldn't find the touted 'role-playing element' that other reviewers claim fleshes out the standard RTS model. Maybe it’s the fact that you can talk to some NPCs who give you quests. These quests are very simplistic and on the small, linear maps with only a few available quests its not like you have a myriad of choices of how to proceed. There's also no character design and progression which I would have expected when playing anything coming anywhere close to a role-playing game. There are hints of a connection to D&D rules, spell names, classes, etc., but these have been so simplified that there is no way to have the kind of varied and open ended characters and gameplay that are possible with those rules. Ultimately Dragonshard, and other ‘games’ like it, are not technically games at all. You don’t play them. They run on rails and you simply click the mouse to move them forward. Since you don’t have any real choices to make, any problem solving to do, there’s no sense of accomplishment. The only motivation to finish the game is that you paid money for it.
That said, if you like RTS games there’s no reason you won’t like this.
