Divinity: Dragon Commander Preview
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Skirmishes play out with a 'mine's bigger than yours' feel, whether it's the size of your army or the biggest, most badass war machine you have created, you generally find there aren't many tactics that can help you out of a bind when you're even slightly outnumbered - as I said it's largely a question of quantity over quality. No 300 Spartans fighting off hordes of entire armies here. This is a little unfair to focus on, as this is largely what happens in warfare, and Dragon Commander's tactics aren't in the battles themselves per se, but more in how you use your early troops in expanding your territories, bases and armies. But when all that is said and done, you still have to defend against, or deploy your own... dragon!
Bizarrely fitted with a jetpack between its wings, you, taking the form of a dragon in the RTS mode, get to take to the battlefield in real time and deal some timely but deadly damage to your foes. Beginning the battle with a passive clock counting down the seconds until you get to unleash the beast, you use the time to build up your army from scratch. Eventually, when the clock counts down to zero, you can then choose to deploy your dragon and unleash some fury. For a limited time, and in another genre-splicing effort, you find yourself invading a real-time strategy from a third person action shooter's perspective. You physically control the movement and speed of the dragon, who and what to breathe fireballs all over, and, being a dragon commander, you also get to command your troops from the air too via some very intuitive controls.
The dragon injects some great originality into an arguably over-saturated genre, and works very, very well. While a little too weak in the beta mode to really put to great use, the full game naturally involves levelling up your dragon with better attacks, commands, etc, but as he is in the beta / beginning of the game, he's just a little too susceptible to surface-to-air missiles and dies (well, get's knocked out until the next respawn) too easily.
