Free MMORPG Round Up

Dragonica

My days, this has to be the most cutesy game ever conceived by the human race. Or any race for that matter. If you were to take every children’s Manga cartoon ever made, 12,467 confectionery stores and every bit of Hello Kitty merchandise on the planet and mix the whole lot together in some kind of magic game-creating box, you would get Dragonica. Now, we have our stance on cutsiness here at bit-tech, but we’re going to have to steer clear of voicing it too much, as it’s clearly a style that has mass appeal. We’ve decided that Dragonica is an SSMMORPG because it’s a Side-Scrolling Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. A catchy acronym, we're sure you'll agree.

The second thing to strike you when playing is the abundance of production value. The opening sequence is an impressively animated full motion video sequence which sets up a little of the phenomenally cliché story line. But hey, games like these aren’t about story lines, they’re about making lots of money! Yes, Dragonica makes money on a micro-transaction based business model. While this has its inherent downsides, it’s not essential to spend money and, at the end of the day, it’s the very reason that you’re playing such a polished game free of charge.


The interface is drawn to fit the cutesy style and is neat, functional and generally well executed. Everything is clearly marked and will be intuitive to most RPG fans. All the regular cornerstones of the genre are present such as skill trees, mobs that give XP and loot, NPCs with punctuation hanging above their heads and a cooking system. Everything is melded together with all the pizzazz of an RPG made by people that know what they're doing.

The combat system is real-time, combo-based and RSI-inducing. There are lots of soft lighting effects too, which adds to the sort of bedazzling visuals that help people get lost in casinos and end up gambling their houses and family away. The game is fast paced, which makes it involving and exiting, but hammering away at the keys is all but guaranteed to cause the occasional pause to massage your aching paws. There are four different character classes, made up of the usual spell casters, melee and ranged which add a level of strategy when you’re taking down large foes or getting involved in the PVP.


The side-scrolling aspect of the game works well, mainly because some effort has gone into providing a little depth of field. Each path that you walk down has some give on Z access as well as the X and Y axis. In addition to this, there are springs of sorts that jump your character to other paths in the distance which you can then travel along from left to right. The decision to make a side-scroller has clearly made the game easier to create than a fully 3D game, and another reason that resources could be spent in polishing it to the fine sheen that’s been achieved.

Conclusion

Everything in Dragonica is incredibly cliché, from the story line, classes and cookie-cutter MMORPG quests. However, it’s well put together and the combination of cutesy design style and side-scrolling format give it more than just a touch of originality. Even if you’re not specifically on the hunt for a free game, but you’re a fan of RPGs and cutsie style, Dragonica is worth a download.