App Army Assemble: Dragon Project - Mini Monster Hunter?

Dragon Project is clearly inspired by Monster Hunter. You head off on adventures, battling enemies, and defeating giant monsters called behemoths.

You then craft weapons and armour using parts you gather from defeated enemies. So far, so Monster Hunter.

Where it differs is in its accessibility. The maps are smaller, the controls one touch, and bringing down a monster doesn't take half your life.

At review, we gave it a Bronze Award and said: "Dragon Project is essentially a slightly more casual take on Monster Hunter, and it just about pulls it off".

We also asked our hardened bunch of mobile gaming experts in the App Army what they thought, and here's what they had to say.

Laura Egri

Dragon Project is a classic multiplayer RPG in a fantasy world where you have to defeat evil monsters and dragons. The anime-style graphics are amazing, colourful, and detailed. It reminds me a lot of Dungeon Defenders in many ways.

The gameplay is pretty typical with daily and weekly quests, achievements, summons, and rewards. Except that you don't summon heroes, you summon enemies.

You'll form a party (which can be private or public), fight monsters, and earn parts required to forge more powerful gear. The higher the monster's rank, the better the gear. You'll learn various abilities and collect pretty outfits. There are also special events for rare stuff.

Combat is quite basic, using just one finger to move, roll, dodge, and perform powerful hits. It's in real time and it feels right at home on the touch screen.

It's free, so involves a certain level of grinding but you can do so with a friend so its not so bad. The characters and dialogue are a mix of quirky and cute as you can expect.

Overall, it's a worthy experience which requires a fair bit of time and money investment.

Chanandler

So here we have Monster Hunter lite for mobile. It looks decent, but I think the controls are awful. The biggest turn off for me is all the free to play shenanigans though. I see that £99.99 option and just think here's a game that wants you to progress forever but never actually achieve anything.

I'll play this for a few hours and then forget about it.

Chase Geier

This is a great game! It's pretty simple, but I love the grind. It does everything it plans to do well. I've really missed games like this.

Glenn Goldberg

Take a clicker, mix it with an action RPG, then throw in a little (okay, more than a little) free to play MMO, and finish it off with a large dollop of Monster Hunter and you get Dragon Project.

It's a really strange mixture but, somehow, it works - and well. Dragon Project is a colourful, action packed, story driven RPG. The gameplay is pretty mindless though, and the controls quite loose, which leads to some frustration at times.

I haven't hit any paywalls yet, but I'm sure they're there. The multiplayer adds a level of fun, especially when a behemoth shows up and you have to group together to take this huge bad boy down.

It's thrilling at times. Dragon Project is a great deal of fun and I can see myself sinking a lot of time into it. It's free, so it's definitely worth a try.

Glen Fox

Dragon Project does an excellent job of making Monster Hunter accessible, and it plays great on mobile. I love the one touch controls, and can clearly see the hard work that's gone into making it work on the smaller screen.

Environments are smaller so you don't have to run around for ages seeking the monster you want to find, and I love it when a behemoth event happens and everyone scrambles to defeat it.

This is one for the grind lovers. In many ways, you kind of have to prepare to make your own fun here as all there is to it is grinding for parts to create better gear so you can do it all over again, just faster.

That might sound dull, but those who love this sort of thing will appreciate that there are no barriers. You can get stuck into the grind right away.