Get out your diamond sword ’cause it is time to go on a quest!
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This is super simple. I was told about this game the day before it was released. I pre-ordered it, and upon its release I played it.
I Don’t really have any big interesting story for this intro, So lets dive on in to the review. I want everyone to remember, When I get to the part about the story I didn’t take drugs this is a real game.
Info
- Game: To The Dragon Cave.
- Platform: IOS.
- Released: May 2022.
- Developer: Kikiriki Games.
The Game
To The Dragon Cave is a release for the IPhone and or IPad. In this “thrilling” adventure you play as a blind Princess, See the spoiler section for more about that below, And her guide the talking doveling.
The game has a story mode as well as an endless mode which you unlock upon completion of the story. You can also play on 3 different difficulties and a simple tutorial will teach you how to play before you get started.
Getting Started
Once you open the game the menus are super simple. Play, settings, credits and quit game. The settings are simple but have all the settings you could want, the credits just list all the people who help in the creation of the game. these also play at the completion of the story.
quit game quits the game and the play menu is where you go to start the game.
Under play game you can:
- start a new game
- resume game if you are mid way through the story
- play a level once you have played through more than one
- the endless mode which you can play once you have fully completed the story for the first time
The tutorial is really well done. It isn’t too long but gives you all the explanation you could need. Also I was impressed that they included in the tutorial a function but didn’t tell you what it was for. This did give a nice little surprise mid way through the story.
My only issue is that once you do start playing it does keep reminding you at least early on how to do the various things the tutorial teaches you.
It does make the tutorial a little pointless and it probably could have just had you learn on the run.
Also the doveling gets a little bit too horny when you start hitting her with your weapons in the tutorial.
Controls and game play
so the primary thing the tutorial teaches you is the controls of the game. These are relatively simple.
- Swipe left with 1 finger to turn left, 2 fingers left draws your bow.
- Swipe right with 1 finger to turn right and 2 fingers draws your sword.
- Swipe 1 finger down to duck and 2 fingers down to drink a health potion.
- 1 finger up fires the bow or swings your sword depending which you have out.
- Shaking your phone throws a fire ball.
The game play is incredibly simple. In most levels you move left and right to center the different enemies and use the appropriate weapon for the situation.
In a few levels you get some variation including the need to duck, and in a few more levels you don’t have to fight, just move left or right to avoid things. That is all of the game play.
For every kill you make you get gold, The better your shots with the bow the more gold you get. This is important as you need gold to buy arrows, health potions, up grade your sword and buy fireballs.
So for my first run I set the difficulty to normal, this is the mid level, an easy and hard mode also exist but I thought slit the difference and play normal.
I will be honest my feelings are pretty mixed. On normal mode nothing accept the final boss really seemed to give me any real challenge. I was making plenty of gold to keep me in potions and arrows and honestly half the fights didn’t make me even use my potions.
Some of the different enemies amused me and different variations of enemies kept things at least mildly interesting. However those variations were mostly just more or less hit points and different movement speed.
In the end I found just firing my bow at things did most of the work and I didn’t tend to use the sword as much. I also felt pretty disappointed that I only got 1 sword up grade to do and nothing for my bow.
Game Demo
I refuse to admit that I am now pandering to the readers. However I did suggest during my last game review that I was going to record the demo while drunk. I didn’t end up doing this but several people said they thought it would have been funny.
So after drinking way to much during a rugby game I decided lets have some fun. So here is a game demo that I recorded while way to intoxicated to be playing a game in which you have to aim.
Sounds
So it wouldn’t be a real review of an accessible game if I didn’t talk about the sounds.
For starters this has real voice actors. Big tick in my book. And even though the doveling does sound like she is doing her thing in a small box. I always think a game sounds much better with real voices and not just TTS telling you things.
As for the games sounds these were pretty good…Not amazing but again reasonably good is fine by me. Nothing felt too loud and they give the option to turn off the music so all of these things actually really work in the games favor. Well balanced sounds, voice acting, and you can turn off the music. Really what more could you want.
The Story
So…I really want to talk about the story and I know some people might want to play this game with out knowing about that, so if you don’t wan to read about the story skip to the next heading.
***Spoiler warning***
Wow is the story for this game weird. You play as a princess who has been kidnapped by a dragon for some reason. That dragon blinds her with his breath cause that happens then locks her in a tower and fucks off some where else.
From here the princess meets a talking doveling who scouts out the fact that the prince has come to save the princess. unfortunately for her this prince is a total bitch and ends up hiding in a cave I assume to cry and urinate on himself.
So with all this the princess finds out she is on her own. and she must fight her way out. now for some reason she can’t just leave, how ever masses of enemies can reach her. so we stand still for a while turning on the spot killing enemies. Until lucky for us a troll shows up! we dodge with no real plan until it kills it self breaking a hole for us to escape.
From here the story gets weird. WE break in to a crystal palace to steal an amulet which allows us to use a new market to buy fireballs. I don’t know just roll with it.
For some reason the thing in the palace gets turned in to a frog then we have to escape through the weird zombie tree forest.
Anyway at some point we realize we don’t know where the dragon is. Now I am not sure how we don’t know where it is but again I am just rolling with it.
So then we go kill the lake horses, yes that is a real enemy, get on the boat and go talk to the 1 person who knows where the princess snatching dragon is. He tells us that the dragon is near the city of the dead. So we go there. kill the spirits and meet the little baby dragon
whoops, we then realize our mistake fight the big bad dragon, and that is pretty much the end. you can choose to save the prince or not(I don’t really know how this affects the story), and we are done.
So a couple of things here.
What? the? fuck?
This story feels super disjointed. I literally never felt like this was a reasonable story at any point. It just felt like disconnected encounters only vaguely linked together. I honestly feel like they put work in to the story so I hate kind of just shitting all over it. but in the end, I don’t feel like most of it makes any sense so I am not really on board here.
Also I have talked about it before and this game feels like a really good time to bring it up again. the main character does not need to be blind. This was done in a really forced way in the story. This game would have been slightly more enjoyable if we were simply a princess fighting with our trusty if not just a little horny side kick the talking doveling.
I think the story is also quite short. This first play through only took me about an hour to an hour and half.
Cost and replayability
So starting with the cost this game wasn’t to bad. Coming in at 9.99 Australian it is 5.99 US and 4.99 in what ever money the British use.
I understand a game like this does need to receive some sort of funding and I don’t think it was too over priced. It also has no in app purchases, so a double win on cost.
For me one of the big things when I consider cost is how much time I could get out of a game. Which means it is directly tied to replay value of the game. In this case I think they have actually done a lot of good things for replay value.
The first is adding difficulty levels. I have mentioned above that I thought the game was a little easy for me on the normal difficulty, so I am interested to see how much harder it is on the hard mode. For people that struggled, the fact they can turn it down to easy and work there way up is grate as well.
The second is that there is apparently different endings. I have only played through once at the time of this review so I can’t comment on how that really affects the replay value. but I might go through again and see if the different endings are interesting.
The final is the endless play mode. This only unlocks after you complete the story so you can’t just play it right away. But if you enjoy the combat in this game and want to just do that for a while this is pretty cool.
So for the price I would say they aren’t asking too much, and there is certainly some replay value (which is better than some games out there).
final thoughts and rating
On the side of things labeled pros.
Voice acting, reasonably good sounds, some variation on enemies, a few moments of amusement, price not to bad, some level of replayability.
However on the cons side.
Story is disjointed, it is a relatively short story, it does get a little repetitive, Normal mode is a touch easy, blind main character, horny doveling never gets any action.
If you like a casual game, have a few spare bucks and feel like this game would be of interest to you I would say pick it up. Other wise don’t.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10.
Conclusion
Have you played the game? Do you agree with my assessment?
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