Crimson Dragon Advance
One of the most exciting things at this year’s E3 Expo is the new consoles. Last year we had Wii U, but this time Nintendo has serious competition from Sony and Microsoft. Running through the aisles, I tried to find an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 game to try first. As I walked through the packed Xbox Show Room, I was greeted with crimson dragon. It is exclusive to Xbox One and comes from the genius Yukio Futatsugi, the creator of three previous Panzer Dragon titles I even got a chance to meet Mr. Futatsugi when he was standing right behind me watching me play his game. So how was the title? Funny, but seemed pretty buggy. Please note that this is a work in progress – this game is not an Xbox One launch title, so it still has a ways to go before it releases.
The first thing I noticed was that the controls seemed a bit off. The dragon he was controlling seemed a bit floating, moreover, it’s a dragon, right? You also have the ability to play games on Xbox One’s new Kinect sensor bar if you want, but according to a Microsoft representative, they wanted to give the consumer both options. Every time I asked a question, I was greeted with the standard “It’s a work in progress, but things are getting better.” This game was still a lot of fun to play.
The E3 demo begins with you running out of a lava-filled cave on your dragon. There’s a lot to shoot at with your scaly friend, like the fiery, floating jellyfish-like creatures I unleashed my beast on. While holding the right trigger you can lock enemies on the screen and once you release the trigger it unleashes the energy on the bad guys. There was also a lightning based attack which I didn’t really bother with as it seemed a bit underdeveloped.
If you are familiar with the Panzer Dragon titles, then you know they are shooters on rails. You don’t really have to worry about where you’re going, the game does it for you; you just have to be able to dodge numerous projectiles and things in the environment. There were stalagmites hanging from the ceiling of the cave that my character automatically walked through without taking any damage. It was entertaining to see my creepy dragon tearing through the rocks. Once again, this game has a long way to go in development.
The Microsoft representative told me that this game is about scoring against your friends. This will no doubt have an online leaderboard where you can keep track of your best times and scores with other people on Xbox Live. This game also has cooperative multiplayer, in case you and your dragon get lonely.
Another cool feature is that you can evolve your dragon. It will change visually and obviously become more powerful. I mean, the dragons already look more intimidating than the ones found in Skyrim; We’ll see how crazy they’ll get once you max out on them. This is the feature that really has me excited to try it out when it launches.
While playing the demo, I finally got to a mini-boss. It looked like a huge fire dragon creature that emerged from the lava. The main way to beat him is to dodge his incoming fire projectiles with your left and right bumpers; that way you can twist and turn around your explosions. It was quite easy and off we went again. The final boss of the demo swooped in and it was stunningly beautiful. The light seemed to shine on his scales and white teeth. To take down this enemy, I generally used the same tactics I used with the mini-boss, but took a significant amount of damage. Once defeated, the demo ends showing an even bigger dragon eating it.
This game was originally set to appear on Xbox 360, but they switched gears and decided to just upgrade the game during development to an Xbox One title. You can pretty much see that it was an Xbox 360 game. The graphical power of Xbox One wasn’t really shown; some of the lava textures looked a bit soft. I was told that they will take advantage of the new hardware and add many more enemies on the screen than the original Xbox 360 version could have included.
I was impressed to see that this game came out of nowhere and is already playing quite well. It will be interesting to see how this fan-favorite series fares in the next generation. I’m intrigued to see how they’re going to use the new Xbox One’s Kinect sensor as well. Only time will tell, but the future looks incredibly bright for crimson dragon.
