G4TV

It seems everybody today wants to be an MMO. From shooters to racers, game developers are finding ways to shoehorn hundreds of simultaneous gamers into old genres in the hopes of copying the success of World of Warcraft. Some, like Test Drive Unlimited, have done reasonably well for themselves. Others, like Dreamlords…not so much. It tries to meld the classic Real-Time Strategy genre popularized by games like Command and Conquer and the original Warcraft into the world of the online masses. This sounds like a potentially bad mix, and though the game shows there’s actually some potential there, it fails to deliver.

Patrial Combat

In your typical RTS, when you’re playing online the biggest thing you typically have to worry about early is getting rushed by a wave of low-level goons from your opponent before you’ve had a chance to build up your base defenses. Take an RTS into MMO-land and your first thought might be that now you’re going to get rushed by someone who’s been building up their bases for weeks or even months. Thankfully that’s not the case, though the way they get around it here seems a bit ornery.

Each player here is completely isolated from the rest thanks to everyone getting their very own island that floats in space. Called a Patria, on this island nobody can attack you so you’re free to build up your armies. If that sounds boring don’t worry, you’ll find plenty of monsters and such roaming around for you to eradicate and gain experience, giving you something to do. But, just like early battles in a typical MMO beating up on these critters is no fun at all.

The interesting twist about Dreamlords is that the act of building your empire and military is completely separate from the combat itself. You navigate your Patria, build armies, research new techs, and acquire resources all via a web-based interface that you access from the game’s official page. Here you click around to move explorer units. When they find an enemy within range you then load up the game installed to your hard drive, pick the enemy you want to attack from a list, and play the game like an RTS. 20 seconds later after you’ve managed to vanquish the opponents you then have to Alt-Tab out of the game interface to the web page, manually refresh that to see the fruits of your victory, then start clicking around again to find the next baddy.

As you progress the battles take longer and get somewhat more interesting but you’ll always find yourself having to go back and forth from the slow and clunky webpage to the installed game on a frequent basis, a process that’s annoying to begin with and is made even more so by the game not being able to be run in a window. The benefit of this split personality is that you can potentially manage your Patria while you’re at work or away from your main gaming PC. And, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment you’ll definitely want to be checking in frequently. However, since you can’t partake in battles to defend your Patria from marauding beasts via the web it’s rare that you’ll want to spend much time away from your home PC.

Slow Growing Tech Tree

One of the more important things that you do via the web-based interface is manage the game’s tech tree. Here you devote your in-game research among a variety of different avenues, like more advanced armories to train stronger units or better wood-gathering techniques to increase your resources. In a typical RTS research that takes more than a minute or two is a big investment. Here researching just about anything will likely take 24 hours or more. And, while you can research more than one thing at a time, doing so massively extends the total research time. So, you’ll need to be logging in to check how your research is progressing and start something new without losing any valuable time.

This archaic rate of progression makes the game very tedious to play, especially since there’s little if anything you can do to speed it up early in the game. You’re stuck waiting and waiting, roaming your Patria hunting down critters with your wimpy armies because you can’t build anything more interesting. Even combat is lacking thanks to the RTS side of the game lacking many standard features you’d expect given the genre. You simply click on your units and tell them where to go, activating special attacks and magic spells when you like. You can’t assign waypoints, can’t tell them to patrol an area, and can’t even assign them into groups. What is this, 1992?

When you do get some more serious forces and get into the Player-vs.-Player battles, fighting to acquire territory on other neutral floating islands, things of course get slightly more tense. However, you’re still using the same clunky RTS interface and the gameplay mode (which tasks you to capture points on the map and hold them) gets old quickly. Wrap it all up with some fair graphics and lackluster sound effects (that you can’t even hear most of the time) and you have a gameplay experience that disappoints to say the least.

Promise Unfulfilled

The concept of this game is quite interesting and it’ll be enough to make some gamers more tolerant than they should be about this game’s faults. But, the execution here is unfortunately too poor to forgive. From having to restart the game six times after the initial install (once for each successive patch to bring you up to date) to having to figure out how to play the game on your own thanks to the online manual missing whole sections, trying to play this game is simply more pain than it’s worth.

Article by: Tim Stevens
Video produced by: Paul Bonnano

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