The I of the Dragon preview

The Russian game developer Primal Software is nearing completion on what looks to be a real cliché breaker. In the game “The I of the Dragon” the goal is not to slay dragons – on the contrary. In this game you play a dragon yourself and your mission is, obviously, to avoid being killed.

That being said there is still the old good versus evil fight and even though you are a dragon you should not expect to burn cities and eat sheep. Nope, your kind of dragon is of the good kind, so you actually have to protect the cities of the small helpless people, as well as kill the big bad evil monsters.

A whole city of people - why can't I just eat one?

If you look past that small detail (it would have been a lot more fun with the ability to play an evil dragon) it does look like the game will be very entertaining. As can be seen from these early screenshots, the game uses Primal Software’s own 3D engine and it works quite well. You control your dragon by a combination of the mouse and keyboard, which is easy to learn – especially with the help of the tutorial.

When you’ve got the controls under control, it’s time to smash some of the aforementioned big bad monsters. And this is when it starts to get fun. Aside from being the classic fire-breathing dragon you are also equipped with various magic abilities and the ability to grab and eat your opponents – the latter is especially entertaining, at least for a while.

As you smash more and more monsters your dragon abilities improve and you get experience points, which you can spend on improving your fire breath or making spells more powerful.

It actually looks quite good

The I of the Dragon looks to be an honest attempt at renewing the action RPG genre using a game concept slightly different to what we’re used to. So if you’re one of the nostalgic people, who still remembers the old Puff the Magic Dragon song from your childhood years, this just might be the game for you – especially if you can look past the unwillingly funny English voices with a thick Russian accent. Unfortunately there’s no official release date yet in Europe, although it has been out for almost a year in Russia.

To kill some of the waiting time you can download the playable demo from Primal Software’s homepage. The demo contains both a tutorial and two missions, as well as four dragon types.

Translated by Bo Kruse