The Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon Review

Overmax Studios offered an interesting solution for presenting the battlefield -all the cities are presented on separate maps, which are only accessible when you enter a city, and the complete theatre of war is represented with a regional map. This map also contains neutral villages, which provide you with money (taxes) if you conquer them. This solution broadens the battlefield, and still presents each city in great detail.

Many of these possibilities and options have already been seen, but the programmers wanted to borrow several of the best features in other games, mix them with some new ideas and create a game that would be equally appealing for the fans of both genres. Unfortunately, Fate of the Dragon turned out to be a mediocre game, which could only be interesting for people who are really mad about Chinese history, or for hard-core RTS fans that simply like to play any RTS game that appears on the market.

The first thing you'll notice about this game is its outdated graphics engine. Even though this is a 2D game this segment shouldn't have been ignored. The game supports 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions, and is done in 2D. The terrain, water and units look pathetic, the buildings are relatively decent as they are animated and in proper size in comparison to the units. I wouldn't go this hard on the graphics it the game were some other genre (the graphics wouldn't be that important in a sim game, for instance). The cut-scenes are pretty good, but there's only few of them, and most of the briefings will come down to a bunch of monotonous text crammed with barely pronounceable Chinese names which could only have a meaning to someone who is really into Chinese history.

So, we come to the matter of sound and music. I suppose that the units speak to you in Chinese, yet even though I'm not too good at it, I don't think they know many different words. The sound effects and music are poor and negligible.

Ok, I know that the audio-visual experience isn't the most important thing in a game, but some other far more important elements don't function here properly either. Complex resource management was a good idea that probably attracted a lot of sim players, but the necessity to build up the entire base with each new mission severely affects gameplay dynamics. The peasants are intelligent and functional, but when you still have to wait for the grain and meat to be prepared before each attack after thirty missions, the magic of the game simply withers away. I mean, most games have mills and farms, but taking care of seven very slow resources is definitely not an advantage. Another thing is that all buildings become accessible after the first couple of missions, so you might just get tired of the game afterwards.

The necessity to build supply outposts seemed to be an interesting feature, but it proved to be less than functional in practice. The soldiers tend to spend their supplies relatively quickly, and getting new supplies is a slow and annoying process, so you'll often attack the enemy with hungry fighters. Your armies will consist only of three different types of soldiers: pike-men, swordsmen, and archers. You will be able to give a horse to any of your units, but the mounted soldier will only be a bit quicker and have several hit points more. Your men will be able to use several different war-machines and several ships, yet still with all that the game can in no way be compared to Age Of Empires or the likes. What's more, regardless of your choice of kingdom, you will always control the same units with identical characteristics and same color.

Fate of the Dragon had a chance to be a real success, but something obviously went wrong along the way. The 32 skirmish and multiplayer maps don't improve the general impression. This is an altogether playable, yet mediocre and average game in any sense.