THE DRAGONESS: COMMAND OF THE FLAME Is A Really Fun Game For Fans Of HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC

If you are a fan of Heroes of Might and Magic then you need to try out The Dragoness: Command of the Flame. Once I got used to playing the game I had a lot of fun with it. However, for me there are some drawbacks that prevent me from liking it as much as Heroes of Might and Magic. 

My first main drawback for the game is the army building. Not all of it is bad, just different. I did like that creatures had health that could be recovered between battles rather than numbers that once lost were completely gone. This made it easy to keep track of how much total damage my creatures were taking. I also appreciated that each one had a shield amount that would be depleted first before losing actual health. My main problem is that each scenario you gain creatures from your town and then that’s it, you can’t keep going back to restock on what you have lost during the scenario. There are places scattered throughout to buy creatures, but their costs are huge compared to the number of resources at times. This definitely makes you be more careful about losing creatures in battle, but it was really frustrating as in the early game you can only bring two creatures with you from your home base even if more creatures are available. There are upgrades you can buy to up this number which I highly recommend making a plan to get as early as possible. I also had trouble with the early game when I went to strengthen my creatures. To make a creature stronger you merge it with an exact duplicate. For example, you can merge two griffins to make a level stronger griffin with a star. But to upgrade that new griffin, you had to have another griffin with a star which means to get a two star griffin you need four to start with. Getting that many with scarce resources proved challenging, but this may be less of an issue in the later game. 

My other main complaint is that in battle it can be difficult to tell which creature you are controlling when you have multiples. A lot of the time I would use multiple griffins and would often accidentally send out one that was super low on health thinking I was controlling a different one. Now that’s partly on me, it happened most when I was in a hurry and not paying as close attention as I should have. At the bottom it shows you the turn order of all the creatures, but when using multiples you have to really pay attention to the base of the creature to know which one you are about to move. I just wish that maybe the creature got some kind of full outline that really helps illustrate the exact one you should be paying attention to. 

There are a lot of positives in favor of this game. I really like that it is fully voice acted, it just always adds something to get to listen to the characters speak rather than just read dialogue. The music and visuals in the game are really lovely too. I enjoyed seeing the variety of creatures and how their look would change as they got stronger.

I did really like the combat overall. I had to shift my way of thinking a little, but once I did it was quite fun. I would definitely recommend making the battle speed as high as possible, or at the very least a little faster than normal. The normal speed for me felt slow and tedious at times, but when I got that battle speed up it really improved the game for me. 

I did really like how your hero could get new abilities and bonuses in each scenario. For every scenario your hero will have three bonuses to choose from each turn. These range from bonus resources, healing, movement speed, and combat bonuses. It was really nice to be able to have a variety of bonuses to choose from each turn, so when I needed to get somewhere faster I could gain movement speed, but if I was going into a difficult combat I could get a bonus to dodging for example. It helped vary up the game play and made it more important which hero you choose each time. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. Even the things I see as drawbacks, while very frustrating at times, are challenges that with practice in the game can be overcome. At the end of the day, I still prefer Heroes of Might and Magic, but this was fun and different enough that I would definitely like to keep playing to the end. I rate this game 8/10.