Dragon Lords (3DS)

After FXGamesMedia finished making the innovative Clash-like “Galaxy Control 3D Strategy” they decided to make another. Exciting right? What will they come up with next? It turns out: nothing — they reskinned their first, calling it “Dragon Lords 3D Strategy”. And it’s a true reskin. In GC3D when you attack NPC island 3 stage 2 it says “oh, no, they’re attacking you” and goes to a base defense. In DL3D, exact same thing. But FXGMedia manage to add one nice thing and makes one odd change.

Decorations! Your fresh base starts with movable, rotatable(!) trees and roads. You can buy more right away. Even the buildings are rotatable. They went all-out on a decoration system to match the best. Despite this big push, the art-style is still poorly matched generic crud. I wonder if someone was once burned by scope creep and was all “decorations, that’s a deliverable! And I don’t want to see any time-wasting notes about fixing dinky little stuff from before”.

Game-play wise, remember how Galaxy Control added a small shove to the Wizard Tower attack, but it was slightly bugged? I guess they couldn’t fix it, since it’s gone in this game. But the real change is how your army is half the size. Like if you would have had an army of 30 archers and 20 soldiers in the Galaxy game, in Dragon Lords it’s 15 and 10. It’s better, I suppose — You’ve plenty of troops and never think “I wish I had twice as many that were 1/2 as tough”. But it seems like a lot of work rebalancing the numbers for this one change.

Every new Clash-like seems to have at least broken troop type. In this it’s Balloons (renamed mini-dragons). They’re mid-game troops that fly and go after defenses and in Clash they’re balanced by slowness and vulnerability to air defenses; but not in this game. I once didn’t look closely and put them all directly in the path of the blower-back air defense thingy. It looks cool in action and was pretty effective at delaying my guys. Still won easily. Mini-dragons are OP. But you know, I’m sure it gets better at town hall 8.