14 DAY TRIAL // Video games have taught us all that dragons are fearsome beats, the kings of the universes they inhabit, adversaries that are hard to defeat and often manage to oppress other creatures living besides them.
In Divinity: Dragon Commander, a dragon can be a flying machine of destruction, able to engulf enemies in fire, weaken their attacks and cast protective spells on his allies.
But sometimes the same dragons become just target practice for upgraded rocket bearing units, which shoot them out of the blue just a few seconds after an imprudent player has used the jetpack to rush to a distant area of the battlefield where he has limited support.
The developers at Larian Studios have made dragons a good example of the glass cannon type of units, a staple of the strategy genre.
They can hit hard and deliver a huge amount of damage to clustered enemies as long as they are properly backed up by their own units, but they are also very vulnerable to hard counters and will struggle to perform against well entrenched forces.
It would have been easy for the team working on Dragon Commander to simply make dragon use a simple way for players to get the upper hand over AI forces.
It would have certainly made the campaign somewhat easier to complete (try it against Hard opponents) and would have made Dragon duels more important during versus multiplayer.
By making the creatures a little more fragile and by asking just 20 population resources for one of them to be activated, Larian Studios introduces more variety to Divinity: Dragon Commander.
I had moments of huge triumph when using my dragon to stop an enemy heavy armor attack which started without coverage from imp fighters and I also had great success in boosting my forces from behind my lines.
But I am equally happy when I die because I have ventured to far and enemies have simply swarmed me, because this sort of balance makes for superb gameplay.