Dragon Summoner

This is a freemium game review, in which we give our impressions immediately after booting a game up, again after three days, and finally after seven days. That's what the strange sub-headings are all about.

I summoned a dragon once.

I found a mystical tome of spells in my local charity shop, read aloud a passage, and suddenly a gigantic scaly beast sprung forth from a swirling portal. The shop owner wasn't too pleased, so I made my excuses and left, taking my new pet with me.

I called him Gingerbeer, which I thought was quite a funny moniker for a fire-breather, but as time passed Gingerbeer became less and less impressed at my convention of naming all animals after foodstuffs. Pretty soon, we had a row, some words neither of us meant were said, and we parted ways.

It was a sad day.

Anyway, here's a review of freemium card battler Dragon Summoner.

First Impressions

As with all the card-battlers I've played so far, I adore the art in Dragon Summoner.

Almost every visual aspect of the game is highly polished and utterly beautiful. Typically confusing menu layout aside, the work on the cards you can collect is incredibly detailed and stylish. Each one is a thing of sheer beauty that awakens that sticker album-collecting part of my brain. I want to see more of them, so I must collect them all.

You can enhance and evolve cards, and the animations linked to doing so have an almost tangible power and importance to them, even though I imagine I'll be seeing these many times during my playthrough.

Unlike a lot of similar freemium card-battlers, Dragon Summoner also tries hard to give you a sense of place and time. The story is communicated entirely in text, and it's an unfortunately wearisome affair that I've already completely forgotten. It's nice to see a developer take a swing at narrative, but it's for naught if the story is lacklustre.

What does work well is the way the game shows you a map of the current quest you're on, and the battles themselves. Instead of viewing it all from a first-person perspective - like Marvel: War of Heroes - you're given a late 16-bit era pixel version of the characters in your party, and a rendering of where your battle takes place.

This grounds the game in the universe, no matter how lightly, and it's very much welcome.

Day 3: The expected and the unexpected

There's been a fair amount of unscheduled "emergency maintenance" by day three of my time with Dragon Summoner, which is a little frustrating. I'm not sure if this is indicative of the game as a whole or just an unfortunate coincidence, but not being able to continue with my game whenever I want to is annoying.

The compensation for this is that there are plenty of game-assisting freebies for you to take advantage of. There's the usual log-in bonus for returning each day and a special card for referring friends. Recruiting other players to assist you in missions is extremely simple.

The gameplay is equally simple. In fact, it's close to being that word's less attractive sibling: simplistic. Almost all you need to know about Dragon Summoner's gameplay is encapsulated in the term 'freemium card-battler'.

As you might have come to expect from a game that's associated with both GREE and Gameloft, Dragon Summoner walks a very well-worn path.

To progress in battles you press a single button on the screen, only stopping to collect the odd bit of loot, and there are no decisions to make outside of the lone path you walk.

It's assuredly a little tougher than some of the card-battlers I've played so far - I've had my party entirely wiped out in a boss encounter, for one thing. But that's not true difficulty, as there was no way of me judging whether or not I had characters of the requisite level in my party to challenge such a foe.

Otherwise, it's business as usual: there's an energy system in play to restrict how much progress you can make in one session, you combine and enhance cards, and you defeat hundreds of powerless enemies until you get to each stage's boss.

Day 7: Same old same old

A week in, and Dragon Summoner definitely still isn't doing that much new within the freemium card-battler space, but I'm kind of enjoying it nevertheless.

I'm constantly getting new cards and gifts and enhancing and evolving them into newer, stronger cards, and the main quest holds very little challenge, aside from the mighty Raid Bosses. These creatures require you team up with pals to defeat them, but as I'm a bit headstrong I always try (and usually fail) all on my lonesome.

There are some quirks typical to games in this genre - most notably an absence of a soundtrack or effects - and there's a worrying amount of flesh on display in the card art, almost all of it female. The menus are occasionally a little sluggish, too.

Even so, the multiple evolutions of the cards and the process of completing collections make Dragon Summoner as compelling as most games of its ilk.

It's not going to convince anyone who's sworn off the genre to come back and give it a stab, but if you get your kicks from looking at pretty art and attempting to complete a digital collection of cards then you won't be disappointed.