Judgement: Not Recommended

View review on Steam

Broken Steam port of a blatantly pay to win mobile game. The PC port has had zero UX work done and is barely playable.

Dragon Kingdom War is a Match 3 puzzler inspired by games like Puzzles and Dragons. Each round you make sliding motions to shift tiles around, with the goal of creating combos of matches. Games like this, require tight controls, and this is where Dragon Kingdom War fails spectacularly.

Sliding via the mouse can be kindly described as janky. You will have tiles jump back and forth, and you won't know where your final placement of a piece will be until it's too late. Half the time it will be on the spot right before where you actually want it.

If you move your mouse too fast you can skip tiles, creating technically impossible moves that ruin any plan, but moving your mouse slowly is not possible for effective gameplay as you only have three seconds to do all the sliding for a round.

The game allows diagonal movement, but it has a hard time telling when you're doing this, making even basic moves like turning corners difficult, as it will sometimes think you are doing a diagonal.

You can clearly see the games lineage as a P2W title, with the premium currency diamonds in the top corner, and every time you lose a match (which will be often!) the option to spend diamonds to resurrect, but no way to earn diamonds outside of the main storyline missions.

I would normally say it was a missed opportunity here to actually integrate proper reward scaling for the Steam version, but it's clear from the broken controls that the developer was only tasked with making the game run.

Review posted on 21/10/2019, 08:28:00.