Dragon Forge Reviews

The idea of playing a dragon in a fantasy building sim had me really interested. After a couple play sessions it's really just a boring glorified mobile game to waste time. The idea is good but the execution is clunky and dull. There is a version of how this game could have been made that I would have enjoyed very much but as it stands right now, this isn't it. It's possible I haven't given it enough play time, but I really doubt the remaining content will change my opinion. I'm disappointed.

What I expected? Dyson Sphere Project with dragons and stuff. What I got? An incremental adventure game. Does it have problems? Yes, the UI is sort of... not UX oriented. Is it worth the money? It depends on the time value of your money. How to know if you'll like it? Would you enjoy a game that is a strange mix of spyro and NGU idle? If yes, grab it, otherwise you do you.

Cookie Clicker advanced but should be called Clunky Clicker Advanced. The Premise You create a dragon and your goal is to clear the land of cursed area by building up mana enough to do so. Mechanically this takes the form of green poisonous looking clouds that bars entry into various areas. Each area you clear requires N amount of mana. And the amount is exponential. Like the first area needs like 1000 mana, and another needs 3.8E18 (Yes, exponential notation). How you gain mana is creation workshops that generate crystals. These crystals are automatically (Or manually) transferred to other workshops to be improved into other crystals and ultimately transferred to an altar to be turned into mana automatically. You can upgrade workshops using mana to make them more efficient. You can probably see where this is going. You are essentially trying to improve mana production constantly so the amount of mana you gain a second improves exponentially. Hence the "Cookie Clicker". And it will generate mana while you aren't in game. While doing this you gather resources like wood, stone, bones from skeletons, etcetera to build more places to generate mana as well as craft upgrades for your dragon (Better HP, fire damage, etc) so you can fight the few monsters on the map. I'm not against the formula of numbers for better progress. It's a game genre some people enjoy and I've played a few myself. However, this game has a lot of clunky interfaces that become irritating to work with showing a lack of vision in the development and design. Some parts refined would do wonders for this game. For example, you need to build your structures on "Flat terrain". And the game is height mapped 3D terrain. The only visual indication for "Flat terrain" Is if the building placement rectangle turns green. And while you are placing a building it is always offset to the upper left of your dragon, which means running around terrain trying to find a spot where the square that you can't move turns green... YUCK. Other clunkiness is if your buildings are too far away from each other you can't ship to them because you can't scroll the shipping selection view. I'm not sure if this was an oversight or a design decision because of how strange the interface is. Controlling your dragon can be clunky as well. While I find the dragon cute and decently animated, the fixed camera position (Yes the camera cannot rotate around any axis) means you are running around with WASD in the direction you want to go. You spacebar to fly but you have a stamina bar while flying. Flying up and down seems simple enough, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to stop flying to stop my stamina bar from draining. Hitting spacebar flies up, shift flies down, but when you fly down to the ground you don't "Land" you just fly above the ground, so your run out of stamina, and while your stamina is low you move slow. So essentially if I fly over terrain I'm going to have an awkward moment of wasting time waiting for stamina for short flights to get over tiny cliffs. OW! There's so many little clunky things that if the developers cleaned up or improved, there might be a small gem of a game here. But it's FAR from being worth $20. Nothing is engaging in this game, and it's "Cuteness' certainly isn't worth the price tag. If it was $5 with some parts of it polished, I might give it a thumbs up. Otherwise there's a lot of games in this genre that are free to play and have more polish.

I am this game's target demographic. I love incremental/idle games and so I am enjoying my time with the game, but it will not be for everyone. I am giving this game a soft thumbs up as it is very rough in its current form and hard to justify the price tag. With that being said, if you like incremental games, I would recommend you add this game to your wish list and watch it over the next several weeks/months to see if some of the rough edges are smoothed out and community concerns are addressed.

This game is not for everyone. If you like Incremental games then its pretty good. If not, then yeah go elsewhere. For me its honestly a 6/10. Its not bad. In fact im quite enjoying myself. However it does have some BIG flaws. An incremental with some exploration and slight (and i mean very slight) city builder aspects. Plus you're a dragon? Sign me the heck up!!!! However... There are some issues to be addressed. When placing your buildings they are always to the upper left of the dragon instead of say where the mouse is. You cant rotate them either and with limited land space being able to fit more in a small area would help immensely. Another thing is that when you gather certain resources that are ammo for your breath attack, mainly coal, it instantly also changes your current attack type straight to your fire breath attack. Then there is the camera. When you're behind a building or cliff or whatever, it moves to top down so you can see. Not too big of an issue, however say you're just walking past a building for only a second and are now back in the open, the camera will shift to the overhead view and stay there for at least 30 seconds making it hard to see. Which is really annoying when you're running from an enemy. Just trying to escape, run behind a building for a second and now you cant see. Plus alot of the enemies can 1 shot you before you even have the materials to upgrade your health and damage. And said materials? Are by the enemies that can one shot you... The game itself is flawed yes. But it is also my bread and butter and i love all the good parts! But the bad parts are still enough of a thorn to make me not give it higher than a 6. If you're into incrementals you might like it. You might not. Also, this game could use a map. The world is big from what i have explored so far so a map would be handy. Not a pro or con that there isnt one, but it would be a good update to the game. And another thing, but this is purely my opinion. The goblins should have been Kobolds in my honest opinion and not goblins. But thats just me.

Oh Spirits...What do I say about this game... I am fairly certain that it will become a guilty pleasure for some of you purely due to being not-terrible and having a cute dragon in it (which is, no doubt, the core selling point - it could be a wise question to ask: Would you bother at all if there was no dragon?). However I need to look at it soberly and given the game is like a Beta or Early Access that was made finish-able and shipped out I cannot recommend it to anyone with clear conscience. Although I won't stop you if you're curious or just want some simple dragon gameplay and NOTABLE resource grind (oh the 3 rare ones...) considering the price was halved since release and it still gets on sale. Technically the game seems feature-complete but nothing there feels properly finished or fleshed out. There is a skeleton to every mechanic or feature but that's it so how about we go through them: The Dragon part: We play as a hatchling that we can only somewhat customize upon starting New Game. The editor however is very poor allowing a few pre-set color/patter setups and multiple sliders for sizes of the horns on its body. So forget about even coloring your dragon as you please. (something like hex colors and a few paint-able spaces could be a lot on its own but alas). At least is decently animated. Flying is quite alright once you get used to it but until you do it feels like wet soap on bathroom floor but then racing challenges were rather painless nonetheless. Combat is as basic as it gets. Given we can just move around and fire projectiles there is no depth or tactic to it. In addition we need to have the enemy selected or we will miss thus flying and raining fire is doomed to fail most of the time which means the best way is to be levelled enough to tank the hits and fire directly - which is viable especially later as we will end up being able to 1-shot everything and tank through everything, but until then the game may prove rather frustrating than relaxing which does hurt the 1st impressions...which aren't good but about that in summary. The World and Building System part: These 2 are put together for a very good reason. The world is actually very well crafted, vast and varied, probably the best piece of the game...except the way it is makes it almost impossible to make anything good about setting up buildings and production chains. If the game was about exploration and gathering, and we would have just a designated hub I think it would be a great idea but sadly no. The game wants us to make buildings, establish delivery chains so we can automate crafting higher tier things (mostly gems for mana that unlocks pieces of the world). Only...there is no space for it. The starting area is too small so we will have to move our base of operations somewhere but the game world is made out of bridges, mountains, other elevations, narrow passages while the buildings require flat and sizable surface to be placed which is actually hard to come by. Additionally trying to settle anywhere outside starting area is a guarantee that monsters will just come and attack us all the time which is less a danger but more a major annoyance. That's not all I'm afraid. There is no smart system to placing your structures, you just have a square behind your character and you must run around to maybe find a suitable space for it...ow boy there better not be any obstacle or your own building in the way as you try to weasel something into a space you thought it will fit (and it might...but tear down the other building first). To move a building you must destroy, collect and place it again which is not convenient at all. To make things harder the camera is fixed so no way of turning it or changing the angle anyhow - if you're in a bad spot or can't see the dragon behind a mountain or in the deep forest TOO BAD (and no 3rd person to behold the world/mess around with the dragon more closely? Come on...) The last thing coming to my mind about it is that there is a limit for delivery range - again the camera while for once in bird-eye it cannot be moved so if the 2 buildings you need to connect don't fit on the screen then you're screwed. It could suggest more smart way of arranging the production but given the state of the game I don't believe that. The Story/Lore...or the gaping hole that it should fill: For the story we have a very bare-bones intro of being told we need to cleanse the land and establish abundance to bring back the dragons...the game doesn't end this way and to get an ending there is a different quest chain to do. Cleansing the lands just gives a message saying the ancestors would be proud...I kind of hoped we would at the very least get a few player-model NPCs at least suggesting it...nope :3 Lore...we actually do learn at least a little bit about the game world or more like how things are in its current state by chatting up the goblins all around the world and settlements, they are also our servants. Yes. Goblins. Why aren't they draconic Kobolds I have no idea. I hoped the bulk of storytelling would be the titled Dragon Forges which require our large-scale produced mana to gain recipes from and...fables? There's like 141 fables to unlock which seem like indeed old fables/folk stories because I could swear I heard of some of these before. It's quite possible they all come from the same book as someone is also quoted to us once we unlock them all. Except...what on earth are some human spoke-tales doing in a game like this? They are completely disconnected from the game world, provide nothing and...aren't even interesting. Is this some kind of idea that we play a hatchling and that's how we get our education? But why like this, why not instead of those learn history of this game world - about the dragons, what happened, why are they gone, their rule over those goblins, about the boss-monsters we do fight...you know, actual Lore...but no >.> Just out of the blue game kill its opportunity to establish some solid world-building in favor of trying to be educational while fits like claws to the muzzle. It's like a band-aid for 0 writing. I kinda liked playing through it in the grand scheme of things but I am a looser salivating over dragon content and because of likes of me I bet it is why we have so few actually good dragon games cuz we are so starved of them we jump on every ship x.x But I said the first impression is bad earlier. After the lackluster intro we are hit with dead silence because the starting zone is the only segment of the world with no music at all for some reason. Then we will notice claw swipe or flying have no sound effects. Everything here comes in text-box prompts, even each stat we gain by levelling up so be ready to smash that space bar to skip quickly. I initially dropped this game for a month after a few hours of struggling to get into it, I came back only because I have issues of being a completionist. This game kind of becomes good after spending hours in it but more like by you becoming powerful enough so frustration goes away and getting used to how basic everything there is and thus "learn" to like it. Btw. the game likes to crash and turns your PC into an oven...didn't find a smooth spot to mention that. I feel I have no solid conclusion here. If you love dragons, love grinding and are too curious for your own good you might try it given it's not expensive anymore but you will have bare-bones stuff all the way through with no hope of betting better or more fleshed out. Otherwise there is no point - no story, no QoL, no point, just aimless gathering and flying around as a dragon that got slapped over it. There are better titles for both gathering stuff and/or plain exploration you can try instead.

-Has building, but does not allow rotation of structures and permitted space is limited -Does not explain certain things you see in key structures (i.e. percentages in gem labs) -Automation chains artificially limited by available workers which can only be expanded through difficult to reach unlocks -Combat difficulty undergoes significant ramping without warning -Game caused a significant system lock that completely glitched the system video and forced a full system reboot I am waiting for a refund for my purchase. This should be considered early access at best.

I like incremental games. I like building production chains. This just isn't fun though. It's not really slow in terms of progression. Just place more buildings down and upgrade your recipes to open up the bottlenecks, and you'll be swimming in mana in no time. This was something that the reviews I read were wrong about. If you've played other game with production chains, you'll do fine. However, it is slow in terms of basic gameplay actions. Every time you level up, you get multiple dialog boxes to click through. There's no decisions to make, it's just something like "You leveled up!" "Your damage increased!" "Your max HP increased!" "Your HP was restored!" "You need x experience points to level up again." with each sentence being another click. Likewise, once of the main progression milestones is delivering specific amounts of mana to the Dragon Forge, and when you do so, your reward comes with a mini-fable. The fable is also comprised of several, consecutive, short dialog windows. I'm not sure which I hate worse: Clicking through the same info-spam every time I level up, or clicking through completely random, unrelated flavor. The former doesn't need to be present at all. A single "You leveled up!" box would suffice. The latter would be charming if we weren't made to sit through it when we just want to get our new recipe. Maybe that would be better moved into a "journal" window that we can open at our leisure. That would allow us to read the fables while we're waiting for a couple more seconds of mana to click that next "upgrade" button. Moving on from the tedious dialogs, placing buildings is a core gameplay action. It should certainly be less tedious than it currently is, and the main problem here is the size of the buildings compared to the shapes in the map. An early NPC remarks that space is precious, and that's kinda true? Basically, almost all of the map is narrow roads with terrain walls forming noodle shapes with very few "rooms" to put buildings into. So a lot of the available spaces are transient spaces. You need to be able to move through them, and the buildings are just big enough that it will be annoying to find a good spot to place them along these roads, and then annoying to traverse that part of the road once it's placed. I would prefer it if placing wouldn't require me to make traversal a pain, even if that meant that building would be less freeform or space would be less plentiful.

huge fontsize , which you cant change. overall an ugly mobile interface, with huge icons and texts. the dragon feels weird when steering over the terrain. the buildings are looking ugly. you build a workshop, you build a laboratory, you build an altar. and then you can close the game cause the altar collects mana even when youre offline. and you need thousands of it. its a bad mobile game. screw that. even more pathetic to sell this for 20 bucks.

After 32.7 hours of gameplay I've finally done it. I've completed the game more or less 100%'d it. Is it worth your time to 100%? No, it isn't a game that respects the player. This game definitely seems to be designed for a mobile in mind. No rotation of buildings. Most actions being mouse sensitive. The Mana function only exisitng to slow the players progression to a crawl. There is even "timesaving" items as rewards which seems like it was originally built to be sold to player. The Story is lack-luster at best. You are the last dragon and you must save the world by cleansing the land of corruption. Interacting with Leo, the previous king summoning boss versions of regular enemies and then eventually being crowned King. The selling point of "Fables of Ancient Wisdom" is just Aesop's fables and other the ancient myths you probably heard before told to you. They are slapped into the game for no apparent reason and literally exist to pad out the game. The game-play as it stands is. Gather resources with your claw/Dragon breath to get experience (Fastest way to level other than the limited quests). Build Gems crafting stations to other crafting stations then to be sacrificed in an altar to get more mana. Using Mana on the Dragon Forge, Upgrading the Gem production stats (each Gem Individually) or cleansing the whole land in general. Eventually fighting enemies of varying strength each time from Skeletons, Orcs, Minotaurs, Ghouls, Stone Ogres, Golems, Trolls, Lichs, Ifrits and finally Demons. There are collection quests of each individual type which is the main goal of the game. Food (To unlock more goblin slaves), Monster Drops (exp), Gems (exp), Buildings (exp), Ingots/Ammo (exp), Races (go through multiple checkpoints), Fetch Quests (Past NPC item A to NPC B to unlock C etc), Battle quests (Kill X enemies in 15 seconds) then collecting every piece of gear and finally collecting every powercard in the game (which took the longest). TLDR. The game is a Collect-a-thon. The Combat is extremely Simple, The Story is forgettable and the controls aren't that responsive. The game crashes every 1-2 hours when you are collecting resources and every item entity will slow your computer down to a crawl when it erupts from your meteor shower spell. Only get this game if you want a Challenge to collect everything. Technically I still have 1 power card to go. But the game still rewarded me the achievement for it so I am just going to go with it. I have a love hate relationship with this game. I feel full of joy that I will never have to play this game again. But also regret that this game could have been better.