Of course your enemies need to have some sort of AI to be any fun to play and Drakan certainly delivers on that score as well. Opponents vary from being fast runners, to being strong or just generally more agile at close range and some are just plain BIG. More often then not they will provide adequate entertainment while you do loop the loops and summersaults in order to try and outwit their swabbing blades. They run after you, combine in groups and often duck and dodge to avoid your lethal swipes. Always presenting a challenge, which ultimately rewards every time you despatch one of the nasty denizens. If you do happen to die then you will find yourself restarting from the last save point, which as a point of fact can be saved at any moment in the game.

On the whole the gameplay is easily some of the best I have ever seen so far, it’s a clearly merged variation of action and RPG all into one sumptuous pudding. Rarely repetitive but almost always original and fun at the same time. Certainly providing the perfect medium between DBTS, Thief and Tombraider. The ability to go from the Tombraider mode into leaping on the back of a Dragon and flying around spitting fireballs or just walking on the ground with the Dragon is certainly unique. If you happen to become separated then a quick call into the air and your loyal friend comes flying over to aid you in your struggle. The difference in difficulty levels is measured by how much damage the enemies cause and that’s about it. As for game environments, Snow, Night, Rain, Fog and Volcanic are all there along with a few other surprises. The levels are huge with mountain passes, villages and bridges stretching high above rivers and then going down far below.

The kind of gamer suited to Drakan is really anybody, it’s so fun to play that any type of gamer used to controlling with a Mouse and Keyboard should be able to have a lot of fun, well worth the money!

The mode in deep question at the moment, ‘multiplayer’, has some bugs where over 5 players crashes the server due to MS Direct Play being a bit rubbish. Thankfully 4 players is more than enough to have a fun Deathmatch or Teamplay game, allow me to explain. There are three modes, DM, Teamplay and a kind of ‘be the first to capture the dragon’, all a fun but with such small and basic arenas can get a little boring. You run around trying to collect magic swords and posions to make you strong, faster or just hotter and then hit everybody with your biggest blows. People will jump, twist and run around frantically in order to beat the next player and the ‘capture the dragon levels’ it’s even more fun as you frantically scramble to ride it before the others (giving you air superiority). Perhaps it’s only downfall is that it uses the god awful M-Player! Possibly the worst service in the world if you want to play on-line games, badly managed and you hardly ever get on the server you want (it’s also slow). Thankfully GameSpy supports Drakan so as soon as everybody buys more copies of this game, there will be a wider range of servers.

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