GB Feature: Divinity: Dragon Commander Review

Larian Studios has treated us to yet another title in their Divinity franchise, and while it definitely resides on the outskirts of RPG hybrid territory, we couldn’t help but offer up a three-page critique of the unique fantasy-themed title. A few paragraphs to send you on your way:

The real-time battles center around capturing various control points: building nodes and recruitment nodes. Capturing building nodes lets you create structures such as War Factories and Shipyards on top of them, and recruitment nodes allow you to build Recruitment Centers, which increase the rate at which you accumulate recruits, your primary economic resource in these battles. Each map has a maximum number of recruits to collect based upon its population, so battles won’t last forever and you’ll often want to be efficient in building your units and structures. Beyond these buildings, there’s also a variety of turrets you can create, though I didn’t find them too useful except for stalling enemy forces for a few seconds.

The units you can construct in battle are relatively stock-standard archetypes that you’ll be used to if you’ve ever played a real-time strategy game before, but of course, they do at least have their steampunk theme to make them fresher. Troopers are your basic infantry unit who have a short, weak ranged attack, Hunters are medium units who are fast-moving and eat light-class units for breakfast, Shamans will heal and shield your friendly units, and Devastators are huge siege units that can fire from a great distance and do huge area-of-effect damage to units and buildings.

On the surface, these units and buildings are very limited; there’s only about a dozen units in total, for instance, and they aren’t all that exciting to use and are somewhat lacking in personality. Where things get interesting is when you start to purchase research upgrades for your units back on the Raven. By spending research points you accumulate over time, you will be able to unlock a variety of improvements and unique abilities for these units that can significantly change how you use them. For instance, Troopers can get the Spoils of War upgrade that allows them to capture enemy buildings, which is usually much faster than destroying them outright and more economical to boot, while Zeppelins can be equipped with Mustard Gas bombs, an area-of-effect denial ability. Even the relatively lowly Hunters can learn Teleportation to open up all sorts of sneak attack possibilities.