Drakan: Order of the Flame (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.5 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Greg Kasavin
• Reviewed on: 08/30/1999
• Updated on: 11/09/2000
• Released on: 07/14/1999
• Originally published on GameSpot: Drakan: Order of the Flame (PC) Review

Every self-respecting fantasy game has dragons, and nine times out of ten it's your job to slay the evil things. But Drakan: Order of the Flame is one of those rarer occasions when the dragon actually does your bidding. Drakan first comes across as a third-person action game like any other in the quickly burgeoning genre, but you'll know this game is onto something early on, when lanky redheaded heroine Rynn releases the kindly old dragon Arokh and takes to the skies on his back. Add great graphics, mean monsters, deadly traps, and huge areas to explore both from the sky and on foot, and you'll see that Drakan is clearly one of the better games in its class, even if it doesn't seem especially original. After all, Rynn's just a medieval Lara Croft riding on your average dragon. You won't remember Drakan for its characters, but you'll have fun playing it.

If the world of Drakan weren't filled with ill-tempered eight-foot tall pig men, acid-spitting bird-beasts, and evil spirits, it would make a beautiful vacation spot. Rynn's adventures will take her from snowy mountains to tropical islands and from ancient catacombs to dormant volcanoes. All these settings are colorful and vividly detailed with realistic weather and lighting effects, and visibility remains high except when you soar way up to see mountains suddenly appear on the horizon as you fly by. Though most of them are your typical sword-and-sorcery fodder, the denizens that sully these otherwise attractive locations are distinctively designed, from the menacing but oafish trolls to the predictably seductive yet vaguely reptilian succubi. Rynn can literally hack them all to bits with a huge variety of mundane and magical medieval weapons, though the greatest difference among most of these is their appearance. And no matter how you slice your wicked foes, they die in a wide variety of ways whose graphic violence helps make up for the fact that you'll face those same bad guys again and again.

Surprisingly, it's Rynn herself who doesn't look so good compared with everything else, what with her absurd Barbie-doll figure and her poker face. You get a lot of close-ups of her during in-engine cinematics, but she doesn't come across as having much of a personality since her expression never changes and her mouth never moves. In contrast, her dragon companion, although typically red and reptilian, is more articulate and looks great from the tips of his leathery, semitransparent wings right on down to his assorted elemental breath attacks. However, Drakan doesn't sound quite as good as it looks, between its nondescript pseudo-symphonic soundtrack and its plain ambient effects. Weak voice acting doesn't help either, but at least the hack-and-slash swordplay sounds just right.

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