Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Dragon Rage

Written by Adam Woolcott on August 14, 2001

First Impressions: Shoot! I forgot my Breath Asure again.

If there's one thing 3DO sure enjoys, its making fast paced action games revolving around blowing the hell out of things and kicking as much ass as possible. Just a look at their PS2 lineup will let you know that.

And with their latest project, Dragon Rage, that tradition continues. However, instead of airplanes or tanks or little green men (not aliens but Army Men), Dragon Rage features a dragon with an apparent breath problem, out to save the day. What results is a game with quite a lot of promise Ц and from early impressions it looks as if there will be fulfilled promise as well.

Dragon Rage tells the tale of Cael, a dragon out to save his kind for sure extinction. Former peaceful neighbors the Orcs have slowly begun to attack the dragon race, due to the desire for УmanaФ contained in dragon flesh, for an advanced type of fuel. And now the dragons are fighting back to save their race before it's too late, led by the aforementioned Cael. The game promises to have deep character development as well...which is always good for a story-driven game.

For the main gist of the gameplay, Dragon Rage features an aerial 3rd person perspective, based upon a whole new engine made for PlayStation 2. 3DO claims the engine can put 80,000 polys on the screen and still run at a full 60 frame per second clip. Along with full anti-aliasing, loads of character animations, a cool physics enhanced particle system for explosions and such (since you are to blow things up, of course), Dragon Rage looks to be a rather pretty game. Very impressive actually.

As for the actual game (which is what counts, as you know), it seems that Dragon Rage won't be lacking in the variety department. Not only does it feature a campaign mode that can be played in single player as well as multiplayer (with 16 levels of action), DR has 6 different multiplayer modes for head-to-head competition. There's an egg hunt, a drag race (sounds pretty cool), a dragon duel (a deathmatch mode I presume), aerial assault, as well as 2 other unique modes of play. It seems that the single player mode might not be super-deep, but the multiplayer modes just may make up for it. And the idea of going through the story mode with a friend harkens back to the good old days of the NES and Ikari Warriors, Contra, and Guerilla War, among so many others. Old-school is well represented.