Divinity: Dragon Commander Preview
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But while the broad political satire (e.g. elves are pro-medicinal drugs, but the Catholic-analogue undead consider it sinful so will you legalise or outlaw it? One faction may withdraw their support based on your decision) of the between-battle state management is a bit of a giggle, what's really standing out to me so far is the intensity of the battles. Sure, you can transform from floating camera into a bloody great dragon, but this is only ever an accompaniment to management of a wide variety of units across large maps with maxi-zoom, doing the rock, paper, scissors thing with a campaign-persistent expanding tech tree, fighting wars of attrition where each side has a sizeable finite number of reinforcements to call upon.
It's proper strategy, like mama used to make brutal push and pull, steadily advancing a front line amidst massed death and explosion. Commanding and conquering, yes, but the knowledge that, at some point, your reinforcements will run out, prevents cartoonish squandering. Build points are seized by proximity, even in the midst of pitched battle, so there's a lot of suddenly dropping a turret or a war factory straight into the middle of things to sustain your push, or suddenly finding that the enemy's managed to build a mortar right next to all your best stuff. Like Supreme Commander, there's no sitting back and waiting for anything to happen here it's all go, all the time, and my jaw aches something rotten from pulling a Clint Eastwood expression all the while.
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In such quiet (or at least online-focused) times for RTS, I appreciate the attempt to do everything, ever while retaining a solid build'n'bash core, and especially that it's firmly avoided becoming simply That Game Where You Play As A Dragon, but it is a bit full on. Especially as it's so perfunctory about how to do important stuff like order units while in dragon mode (F2 to select all, Q to make .m move or attack, since you ask) but spends forever and a day bombarding you with comedy Scottish dwarf dialogue. The looking back to the strategy classics of yesteryear goes too far in terms of the traditionally irritating and excessive unit barks, too. Calm down, just calm down. I know you wrote a funny, but there's no need to make people hear it 5000 times an hour.
