Today I came across a game called Dragon & Castle AR. The screenshots looked really impressive and for a moment I thought I found a great new ARKit game to play—ioh boy I was wrong.
Dragon & Castle AR has glorified itself in the description as an “Intense Battle” AR game. The gameplay is quite simple, you control a dragon and you need to beat as many enemies as possible. The enemies are just people walking on the top of a castle structure. The player needs to tap on the area where he wants the dragon to move to and than after the fire refreshes, the dragon will automatically unleash a breath of fir eand eliminate any enemy that the fire touches.
The goal of the game is to try to eliminate as many enemies as possible under 30 seconds and get to star in the global leaderboard.
The presentation of the game is really nice, including a beautiful detailed large map with great 3D dragon animation and visual effects
The problem is this game that this game is nothing more than visuals. The gameplay is tremendously boring, not challanging, and I think that even calling that type of interaction “gameplay” might not be the right words to describe it. It doesn’t even feel like a game and there is nothing even intense or exciting about it.
It felt like the developer was trying to me with the beautiful 3D models, but as an aging gamer, I know that beautiful visuals are not enough to make a good game. In some ways, it was kind of misleading. You see such beautiful screenshots with a big dragon and a beautiful stunning game’s icon and you think to yourself that there is a great AR game waiting for you there, but no, there is not.
After playing it for a few minutes (which was more than enough) I could just imagine what an amazing game the developer could have created using the same scene and the dragon. I would personally create a 1-vs-1 PVP match (I’ve seen this in VR), that one player, the non-AR player, needs to light torches in the castle while trying to avoid being detected by the dragon above him. Another option is to build it around different defense structures and enemies lineup with increased difficulty. The map looks really great, including the dragon’s animation, so it’s just a shame that these fine 3D models turned out to be in such an unexciting game.
Things got even worse when I found that the microtransaction is for extending the match time to 90 seconds. Why should I pay for this, just to get the option to appear higher on the global leaderboard?
I am disappointed that such a beautiful AR scene was delivered with such a poor gameplay experience.This is probably one of the worst ARKit games that came across, gameplay wise. The game is free, but I definitely recommend skipping it, unless you just want to see dragons fly in AR, even if you do, it’s better to play Twilight Pioneers: Dragon Arena than wasting your time on this.