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About the game and its developers
Dragon Kingdom is an online fantasy-strategy game set against the backdrop of a mythical world dominated by dragons, and features a player-controlled environment, a buildable and expandable kingdom, and elements from MMORPG and Tycoon Simulation games thrown in with good measure.
Dragon Kingdom has been developed by X6 Game, who claim to be one of the top game developers in China for mobile platforms. X6 Game’s goal is to become the leading mobile game developer globally, and to offer high-quality mobile games to global mobile users.
Knowing the Game and its features
If this is your first time at a Strategy game, it can be fairly overwhelming. When you first launch the game, you’ll need to create your profile and then go through a detailed tutorial. The tutorial is quite lengthy but explains all of the games features in detail, and helps you to get familiar with the general environment of the game. The directions in the tutorial are quite easy to follow and basically define what you would be doing within the game.The tutorial cannot be skipped, but it’s a good idea to go through it religiously, as the game is reasonably complex and it helps to get to know the game before you jump right into the action.
Once you are done with the tutorial, you start with one small piece of land, basically a small island, which you need to develop by building farms, different types of structures like food deposits, barracks, churches, watch towers and the likes. Your objective is not only to develop your island and grow it, but also to protect it against enemies. Each structure that you erect will have its own purpose, and is important to the well-being of your kingdom. The key is to learn how to use your land efficiently by having a good combination of farming plots as well as building types.
There will also be various quests and quizzes that you can complete, to gain experience points and level up. You will see several people in the kingdom walking around with a question mark over their heads. Tapping on them will let you interact with them and they may assign you additional quests too.
In addition to building and expanding your kingdom, you would also need to develop your army, and develop your battle force. You can have a group of heroes, who lead your army into battle against enemy forces. In battle, heroes will be able to collect all the treasures from the enemies that defeat, which adds to your kingdom’s wealth. More fights and battles, will help the heroes gain more experience points and level up, allowing them to have more soldiers in their own platoons. Experience points and skills from older heroes can be transferred to new heroes. Thus you would be able to build a strong army with diverse skills.
Each component of the game, like you yourself, your army, the heroes, in fact even each building that you have erected, follows its own progression. The challenge in Dragon Kingdom lies in making each of these components gain experience and level up , and doing so in a balanced manner.
Your farm plots will provide you with food, gold and other resources that are needed to sustain and develop your army. Also, treasures and booty recovered from enemies can be traded for huge amounts of money, which can be used to upgrade your heroes and for recruiting and training new soldiers for the army.
Interactivity – The MMO element
Since this is an online strategy game, there are many other players like you, who a re also developing their own kingdoms. You would need to not only build your own kingdom from within, but also conquer more island kingdoms to expand your realm. The aggressive approach needs to be balanced with a collaborative style as well, where you can make friends and allies with neighboring island kingdoms. If you enjoy interacting with other players in this kind of a game, Dragon Kingdom gives you ample opportunity to do that.
Gameplay
Like all development strategy games, Dragon Kingdom is also fairly slow paced. To start with, the tutorial itself is considerable long, and cannot be skipped. Then once you get your own little island, it may take hours, or days, depending on how long and how often you play, to actually get your own island in shape.
While the navigation is easy, there is a lot of content and options available on the game screen. On a smaller display, it could get pretty crowded. Anything less than a 5″ display can start giving you a headache pretty soon. The nitty gritty of the game may appear overwhelming at first, but as you start with building and expanding your kingdom, you get used to the mechanics pretty soon.
You can access all the game content without spending any money, but there are certain in-app purchases that can help make your progress easier by adding time-saving bonuses and other conveniences.
Conclusion
The game is massive, and the possibilities of how you can evolve as a kingdom are endless. There are a large amount of players who are constantly online on the game’s servers, so you can be assured that there will be no dearth of activity every time you dive in. Like all RTS games, Dragon Kingdom too, is not a game you can finish in a few sittings, and would take several hours of gameplay, if you are not an experienced RTS gamer, to master the dynamics of the game. The game will keep you busy for quite some time. One drawback that I personally felt, was the screen. There are a lot of buttons on the screen and there were constant in-game message pop ups. On a smaller display, like on a phone screen, it can get crowded pretty quickly. There didn’t seem to be any option to turn off the messages. The game may be more suitable for a larger display. Secondly, while the graphics and transitions were quite smooth on my Galaxy Nexus, the font size of the text was way too small to be able to red comfortably, even with my reading glasses on. It appears that the game has not really been optimized for displays higher than 480 x 800, and with a large number of Android smartphones packing qHD or higher resolution displays, it might be a good idea to ensure that the game looks and works well on these.
Overall, it is a pretty engaging strategy game, which stitched together the RPG, MMORG, and RTS elements pretty well. Considering it is available as a free download from the Play Store, it is definitely worth a shot, and you wont be disappointed.
What’s good?
- Good mix of RPG, MMO and Strategy gameplay.
- Lot of content to explore
- Servers are quite active – indicating game popularity
What could be better?
- Support for high-resolution displays – Text size appears too small on 720 x 1280 displays
- Too many buttons on screen, plus in-game message popups can make gameplay difficult on mobile phones with smaller screens (< 5 inches)