Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="jeep"]OK so I'm a fan of the new Eberron Campaing setting in DnD. I'm happy they decided to use it for the MMO DnD, and I noticed a game on the shelf the other day called Dragonshard set in that world. It isn't like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale at all. It's an RTS (billed as the first DnD RTS, which isn't true. <a href="http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=1079">Stronghold</a> was a good game.) This one sort of reminds me of Heroes of Might and Magic. You get a leader, and then you manufacture captains, and they gain followers (one less than their level). You have to manage the buildings in your bases, because the more you have of one kind, the higher the level of the captains for that kind. You get rogues, clerics, barbarians, and they have, in abstract, the kinds of powers you'd expect. So I guess it's more like the DnD minitures battlesystem. You only get 6-18 captians on the first few maps, and if you level them carefully you get 3 times that many followers, and the battles are pretty crazy with 150 models on the screen at once. It ties in fairly well with Eberron (even if the "good guys" in this game are not necessarily so in the pen and paper version), where you are searching through a jungle continent for lost artifacts. The short cutscenes are FF7-level quality and the interstitial loading screens are worse - it's pretty much unacceptable for a modern game, but given the poor quality of the art in the most recent Incarnum book, it's safe to call it representative of the DnD experience. The game is new, the developer (Liquid/Atari) is crappy, so there's a few bugs. One of the better melee units in the game is the warforged titan, a giant clockwork knight. Unfortunately, they have the habit of randomly freezing, which wasn't an aesthetic choice. You don't lose them, they don't die (not even if you suicide them), but they are frozen in place, can't fight, and you can't replace them, so you continue the map short one captain for every one that gets frozen. The first patch doesn't fix it. Anyway it's not worth the current price of $50, but I'd throw $30 at it next month if you like RTS, it's good enough to hold your attention for a while. /jeep/[/quote]