If you love [i]Gothic[/i] style action RPGs, then don’t read on. Just get Drova, you’re going to love it! If you always hated the way these games work, don’t bother reading this review either. Drova is way too much of [b]a direct homage to [i]Gothic[/i][/b] to win you over.
But [b]if you’ve always had a more mixed view of [i]Gothic[/i] style games[/b], because you appreciate the strong atmosphere and sense of challenge they build, while thinking they have a tendency to limit player agency beyond what feels good to you, then [b]Drova might be able to win you over yet[/b], and here’s why:
The [i]Gothic[/i]s, [i]Risen[/i]s and [i]Elex[/i]es of this world are all games that force the player to approach them in exactly the way they want to be approached. If there’s an area the developers don't want you to reach yet, there’re probably enemies around that’re just flat-out stronger than you and they wear armour that negates almost 100 % of the damage you do. [b]The idea is that you join a faction, do quests for them, and get drip-fed better weapons and armour by the game until you’re in a position to actually do some damage to these high-level enemies[/b]. That’s certainly a functional way of doing gating in open-world RPGs, and it’s definitely more challenging and interesting than having all enemies scale to your level like in [i]Oblivion[/i]. But it also means there’s often nothing at all you as the player can proactively do in these games, other than follow exactly the path through the game which the developers have prepared for you. This meshes well with [i]Gothic[/i]’s central idea of being thrown into a dog-eat-dog prisoner colony. But it also means the game doesn’t care how well you play or how you build your character. If the developers have decided they won’t give you the weapons required to defeat that big troll on the bridge until chapter 3, then you just won’t be able to do it until you’ve followed the main quest to that point. Period. And some people just don’t care for being arbitrarily limited to such an extent in an open-world RPG, even if it adds character to the world.
[b]Drova does exactly the same gating thing, except it also allows (and anticipates) you to go beyond that very limiting structure if you play smart[/b]. When I played Drova, I managed to explore almost all of the open world in chapter 1, and I got myself some nice endgame weapons and armour on top of it, before I had even joined one of the game’s two main factions. [b]You may argue that that’s cheesing the game’s intended progression, but the brilliant part is that Drova’s writing reacts to you doing so[/b], meaning the developers are fine with you ‘sequence-breaking’ the game if you play it smart. There are multiple points both in side quests and even main quests where you may have already explored that one dangerous area or beaten that one terrifying monster, and when someone tells you to go do exactly that, you can respond “already taken care of!” I think we all know plenty of other RPGs that would’ve had you going “Ok, I’ll do it!”, leave the dialogue, then start dialogue again just to go “I’ve done what you asked.”
So [b]while Drova absolutely wants to lead you by the nose like a typical [i]Gothic[/i] style game, it’s also not above allowing you to break the deliberately very limiting progression[/b] if you’re smart about it.
Speaking of which, [b]Drova has really good dialogue design even beyond this sequence-breaking stuff[/b]. When I was playing it, there were so many options to go back to characters I’d met earlier and tell them about things I’ve done, for example. When someone tells you about a person they used to know, and you find that person’s corpse later on, you can absolutely go back to tell the first person about it, even if there’s no associated quest. Many characters will reference things you’ve done for them previously, and while I can’t say for sure that this changes their behaviour in any way, some of the dialogue does suggest it. For example, I caught a criminal, but I didn’t want them to be punished. So I gave them one more chance, and that character then remembered I’d previously caught another criminal who was burned alive for their crimes; so they decided to just abandon the criminal life for good. There are [b]many little details like that in the dialogue[/b], and together with the [b]simple atmosphere-enhancing NPC schedules[/b] (NPCs will go to bed or walk around camp during the day), some [b]basic crime response systems[/b], and [b]NPCs moving to different camps as the state of the world changes[/b] throughout the main quest, this [b]makes Drova’s world feel more alive than some other larger-budget RPGs I could name[/b]. And if that’s what you’re looking for in an RPG, Drova is definitely worth a look, even if you don’t like the gating system!
P.S.: Don’t worry, even going into chapter 2 with the most powerful weapons and armour in the game, Drova was still a challenge, as its enemies are absolutely deadly regardless. You’re just giving youself a bit of a head-start.
