Gamescom 2011: Dragon Commander First Look

Developer: Larian Studios / Publisher: TBD / Platforms: PC, TBD Consoles

Dragons are awesome. Jetpacks are awesome. Dragons with jetpacks? I’m not quite sure how you measure that on the scale of hyperbolic amazement.

And yet Dragon Commander is a game about dragons with jetpacks. It’s a crazy combination, but so is the rest of the game’s feature set, so let me explain.

Set within the Divinity universe, at the beginning of the history of the Dragon Knights (soldiers who quite literally turn into dragons), Dragon Commander is a hybrid strategy, RPG, and flight game all in one, with a little bit of board game sensibility, too.

At its heart, it plays like a flight game during battle. Like Dynasty Warriors, you’ll select generals who will command their own squads that fight for you. Usually these squads will be made up of aerial fighters and machine weapons, so there’s definitely this cool sci-fi vibe going on.

As you race around the gorgeous looking battlefields via rocket-propelled backpack fit for a giant flying lizard, you’ll be engaging in combat with sky-bound enemy forces, from small fry fighters, to large mobile platforms bristling with guns. Destroy the enemy base, and its victory for you.

Since you’re a dragon, you have cool abilities, like projecting area-of-effect shouts that destroy small enemies, or shooting flame blasts that lock on to enemies. You can also command your generals to attack different targets or cover your back.

But you also don’t have to get so directly involved with the proceedings. There’s also a plan in place to be able to play the game like an RTS, looking at a top-down map of the battlefield and giving commands to your troops on the fly, allowing them to execute your will.

These combat scenarios take place within the context of a Civ-style, turn-based strategy game involving conquering territories on the world map. As you conquer different territories, you’ll gain crew members from those territories on board your awesome flying techno-mothership, the Raven. This is where you’ll execute all your strategic commands, like what units you’ll go into battle with, spending experience on upgrades, talking to NPCs etc. NPCs will also give you different tasks, and as you complete those tasks, you can earn cards, which when spent before a battle, can increase your army size or gift you with powerful weapons.

The game is still early, but it’s genre-blending in a way that is very interesting. The team even designed a prototype board game version of the game to play test the systems and rules they had in place. And, as I mentioned, it’s very pretty. The landscapes are vast mountains and islands above which armies go to war in the waning glow of the sun; the draw distance is very impressive, and the rolling cloud effects that cover the landscape add a great sense of ambiance (the AI will even take cover in the clouds to escape your view).

If you’re a Divinity fan, Dragon Commander will be a very unique entry into the canon when it comes out on PC and unspecified consoles in 2012.

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