The Dragoness: Command of the Flame

Хоть и взял со скидкой, и механики из героев, графика и музыка неплохая. Но - игра унылая и через какое-то время просто надоедает. Я люблю такой жанр игр, но по сравнению с героями, кингс баунти, дисциплес - это просто жалкая пародия, на которую не советую тратить ни денег ни времени.

Игра, которая достойна иметь более высокий рейтинг, но странные люди постоянно сравнивают её с героями мать и магии, которые являются весьма отдалёнными родственниками. Здесь нет ни думстаков, ни городов, ни прочих атрибутов настоящего клона хомяка. И это прекрасно. Хвала Гейбу, что есть дёмки и я смог заценить эту игру на старте, и она таки занимательна. Во-первых это пошаговый рогалик, в котором герой каждую миссию качается с нуля и имеет несколько стартовых билдов на выбор. Во- вторых каждый монстр в бою таки Личность, и воюет сам за себя. В-третьих интересная система улучшения монстров, где два равных сливаются в более крутого. В-четвёртых система брони и уклонения, которая позволяет проходить схватки без потерь. Есть свои недочёты, но это, что называется, крепкий середнячок, который вполне достоин иметь позитивные оценки. ---- A game that deserves a higher rating, but strange people constantly compare it to the Heroes of might and magic, which are very distant relatives. There are no doomstacks, no cities, no other attributes of a real HOMMster clone. And that's great. Praise to the Gabe, that there are demo versions so I was able to check out this game, and that was entertaining. Firstly, it is a turn-based roguelike, in which the hero is leveling from scratch each mission and has several starting builds to choose from. Secondly, each monster in battle is a Person, and fights for itself. Thirdly, an interesting system of upgrading monsters, where two equals merge into a cooler one. Fourthly, an armor and evasion system that allows you to go through fights without losses. There are some shortcomings, but this is, as they say, a good game, which is quite worthy of positive ratings.

I saw before purchasing that the game had mixed reviews, but most of the negatives I saw at the time were from people who didn't really seem to be fans of HoMM and its kin, so I bought it anyway (also, it was like $5). Unfortunately, this is just not a great game, even in the current dearth of HoMMalikes. I give it points for breaking away from the classic formula with some interesting ideas (unit merging, a ration system that encourages you to actually push towards your goals a little faster, the general application of a roguelite formula for scenarios), but not all of them work out. The game uses single units with persistent health bars a la Age of Wonders, but all creatures have a shield (about the same size as their health bar) that regenerates at the start of each battle. This *seems* like a good idea in concept, as I'm sure we're all sick of the AI throwing poorly-equipped heroes at us to chip away at our armies in single-turn routs... but in practice, it largely boils down to several turns of units pointlessly smacking each other before actually doing any real damage (and without any morale system I could see, even once you get into the actual health bars, every unit operates at full strength until their last breath). And you'll resent it when a random overworld monster manages to break through one of your shields, too, as health takes FOREVER to regenerate. We're talking upwards of a week for a half-health unit to get back to full, and that's *with* an end-of-turn healing bonus from the hero. And I'm not going to even get into the dodge mechanic (yes, every creature in the game has at least some percentage chance to completely avoid attacks). I only got up to (IIRC) the third scenario (an absolutely mind-numbing affair of holding a garrison against successive waves of stronger and stronger attacks, made more painful by slow overland speeds and high resource costs making it nigh impossible to find and recruit more than another unit or two before the next wave hits), but it also seemed like there weren't any actual "factions" per se - just a whole bunch of miscellaneous units that could be recruited. Additionally, as far as I encountered, no units had special passives or attacks, just access to spells (which may or may not be the same ones the hero has access to?). Together, this makes building an army feel haphazard and aimless at best, as any synergy between units feels like it's purely by accident. I'd also be remiss not to mention the major technical issues I had with the game. Every time I launched it it froze up my entire computer for the better part of a minute. I figured it was a problem with running the game in fullscreen and went to change it... only to find that there is no borderless windowed option, only fullscreen and windowed (which also seemed to cut off part of the UI). Closing the game frequently also caused some (shorter) lockups. And the game had some kind of post-processing effect that shut off every time the hero moved on the map, resulting in a truly bizarre focusing and re-focusing effect across the entire screen. It seems like this was the studio's first major outing, and I respect that they were trying to mix up the formula. It's a shame the end result doesn't hold up.

This game is ok. Maybe it's not the best one, but still I had nice time during playing it. There is a sense of humor, a simple plot and many monsters. It shouldn't be compared to King's Bounty or Heroes because this game has own style and if you don't do it, you won't be disappointed. 6/10

This game deserves a higher rating. I held off purchasing for a while because of the Mixed reviews, but I'm glad I decided to play because I had a fun with it. I'm not saying it's perfect, but a solid 7/10 for me.

Note: If you played the Demo earlier you will encounter Achievement progress issues. To fix it you will have to purge your saves and settings. It's located in %localappdata%low or more specifically: Appdata/Locallow/CrazyGoatGames if you prefer. Nuke content of this specific folder and you'll be good to go. This oddly became a comfort game for me since I tried the demo. I don't know, maybe I do enjoy this more straightforward and simplified take on HoMM concept or am too excitable about serving a dragon queen or just bonded with our companion Natiq. In any case, it's a decent game I enjoyed a lot but far from ideal. I think comparing it to HoMM is not fair given it's a similar game idea but very differently executed. Here we don't conquer or manage castles each mission or command multiple heroes. Instead we grow army via buildings and resources found on the mission map and our hub city is detached from the world making it a base mostly for exposition and collecting upgrades before the next mission. Also it takes greater focus on the story as it doesn't have the design that would allow freeplay like HoMM. I really wish I could personally compare it to something actually similar but I happen to only know Spellcrafter which was a terrible game. But I know more of such games exist as other reviewers do mention such. I like this game's structure, story focus and thus the characters and interactions happening as the map is explored. But the biggest pillar of such a game is the tactical creature combat which here I'd say it's simply good enough (because I've seen worse...). We will not find here the real variety or complexity we'd expect from other games but this game tries to fix it with scarcity of troops and making do with what we can acquire. In hindsight seems like a good plan given lack of factions and having access to everything. Even though many units feel very same-y or just not good sometimes this is all we can get and have to adapt. It's not perfect but works and there are ways to cheese with right starting unit, artifacts and hero talent. Alternatively you can hire mercenary unit to take it into a mission for more starting power. There are some issues here. Like mentioned in the beginning you can break early game achievements by playing the Demo (both game versions use the same catalog). The game can crash sometimes. The max combat speed should be the default one and that have faster variants. Though the biggest problem I had was the loading times. Maybe my HDD is the problem but as the game needs to go through a loading screen between exploration and combat this accumulates and takes discouraging amount of time. Given difficulty achievements are counted separately (for whatever reason) I'll wait till I can upgrade before attempting full Completion. In the end it's a decent game I had good time playing. Pretty sure it will bore a hardcore HoMM player but for less advanced or more casual people it should be just fine to get into such maybe niche subgenre.

Looks like my childhood dream of making a game about dragons: there are dragons, and then MORE DRAGONS, and you run around as an elf girl commander. Oh oh, even better if you're a DEAD elf girl commander! The rest feels like a Heroes-like game reduced to its bare minimum. I’ve put quite a lot of time into it just for the achievements, because I have a lot of “free time”, and weird little janky games like this are my guilty pleasure. But honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it to Heroes-like fans. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, really, except people who enjoy weirdness as much as I do.

I like the game so far. Its not as shiny and polished as some bigger titles but with some patience you will find into the mechanics and you will get some HOMM-just another round-feelings. I have rarely crashes which are not a real problem to the strict autosave. Bugs I havent really stumbled into so far. With the huge discount at moment its worth the try.