[Addendum: I mistakenly stated that Drakensang Online was built on the Unity Platform. This was incorrect, it is built off of Bigpoint’s Nebula3 engine.]
Drakensang Online is a straight up isometric dungeon crawler, ala Diablo, and for me that is enough of a reason to at least pick the game up and give it a play through. For fans of dungeon crawlers, Drakensang does not disappoint. Otherwise, the game doesn’t have much to offer outside of the wholesale slaughter of minions and collecting of gear with incrementally higher stats.
The first thing you’ll notice about Drakensang is that the game looks and sounds great. Not great as in comparable to your full client games, but the Nebula3 engine does an excellent job of cramming as much visual quality as it can into the tiny browser package.
Combat handles fluidly with very minor targeting issues. Most of your game time will consist of walking around city hubs with other players, upgrading your equipment, selling your vast quantity of loot, and taking on quests. The quests are the usual fashion of “kill ten rats,” “kill rats until they drop ten buckets” and “use items on nodes.” PvP takes place either through consensual open world or through team battlegrounds.
Following the lead of Diablo3, Drakensang employs a mechanic of health orbs that drop during battle that can be picked up to restore health. Bosses drop these at regular intervals as their health is whittled away, and they replace the necessity of carrying and sucking down large quantities of potions. In addition, while your list of abilities is rather small in comparison to most MMOs, you’re likely to find a proper use for each ability granted to you.
The cash shop in Drakensang is powered by Andermant, a currency that can be slowly obtained through normal gameplay via quest rewards and random drops, or via real money at a base rate of $2 for 1,600 up to 246,700 (odd number) for $200 (a 35% saving!). Andermant can be used to purchase temporary buffs in experience and strength/defense. To expand your inventory to its maximum storage (49 extra spaces) would cost you over $200, or 249,600 Andermant.
For what it is worth, I manage to accumulate at least forty Andermant in each play period (around an hour, sometimes less), most of which I put into upgrading my weapons and armor. You’ll come across chests in dungeons that require keys that can only be purchased with Andermant, to which I can only say give them a pass. I haven’t had a single chest open that was worth the hundreds of Andermant that the keys cost.
If you were one of those people who passed up on Torchlight because it didn’t have any multiplayer (and thus no PvP) and played Diablo and Diablo II primarily for the PvP, you will likely be put off by the presence of the pay-for-advantage system. Otherwise, I can’t see PvE focused players getting angry that somewhere, someone is killing bosses in one or two less hits. And even if you get bored with Drakensang, you can always return. It isn’t going anywhere, not with Bigpoint’s profit margins.
Drakensang Online isn’t exactly a deep game, but then again fans of the genre are likely here for the same reason people enjoy Serious Sam, for the hacking, slashing, spell flinging, and masses of limbs and entrails flying every which way. It is popular, open world PvP is consensual, and the cash shop is generous (to an extent) if you’d rather not throw real money in. Everyone of the same class looks virtually the same, but that factor quickly moves aside to the actual meat of the game: Gremlin genocide.
MMO Fallout 