Dreamlords: The Reawakening

The game is driven forward by a cycle of grinding PVE or PVP enemies which grants you gnosis, which expands your population, which allows you to research more technologies, unlocking better troops and giving your Dreamlord experience, which upgrades and unlocks more stuff, so you can grind higher-level enemies for bigger rewards. At the end of the roughly quarterly eras, your city is destroyed, along with all your troop, buildings, gear and whatnot, and you can choose a new race and start again; your dreamlord retains its experience, so the longer-term game is focused in unlocking more traits for him. Notably it's much easier to do this if you're willing to pour real money into buying tribute, which allows you to buy experience and equipment.

The fundamental flaw of most current examples of the MMORTS is that it has to somehow combine rewarding rapid button-pressing and time-critical action from the RTS/RTT side with resource-management and persistent empire building, which can't be allowed to unfairly punish competitors that might be offline or destroy enough of someone's forces that they don't want to play anymore. Which means that the effects of PVP combat have to be either entirely consensual (taking the point out of an always-on game) or be backed up by AI defences (taking the point out of it being a multiplayer game). Dreamlords has gone for the former, accompanied by era restarts every few months, as a form of temporary rebalancing and also has that solo game you play in parallel to the PVP.

Moreover, the rudimentary combat simply isn't exciting. You have to molly-coddle your troops around the place and tough battles can be won by playing around with the stupidity of the system; thankfully, it's in a permanent state of rebalancing, but the first era was overbalanced towards the beast faction. Far from being massive, it's actually tiny; much of the time is spent fighting (dumb, tactic-free) AI enemies where the challenge comes from working out if your level is high enough to kill everything on the map or not, and the most people you can fight in PVP is one.

Yes, there are lots of people to fight; but there are lots of people to fight on Battle.net and that doesn't make StarCraft an MMO. Yes, Convergences give you the impression of a guild, but you can't actually do anything together. There are slightly different tactics in PVP and there are different tech trees to explore to improve your performance in that, but it mostly comes down to your current tech level (which restricts who you can fight anyway) and your willingness to gamble troops (who'll die permanently if you lose too many of them).

As you can see from the screenshots, the game lacks graphical polish. The 3D graphics are somewhere between the old, old Warhammer: Dark Omen and Rome: Total War, though without the hyperbolic flair of the former or the historical accuracy of the latter. Animation is clunky, units glide across the landscape, and modern special effects are superimposed on a low-poly, dull-looking environment. Let's move on.

I've laid into Dreamlords a lot here, so here's the core criticisms again: there's more rewarding and fun game mechanics down your local garage and this actually feels like a step-back from story-led RPG/RTTs like Dark Omen. It misses all the advances in GUI and graphical flair that modern RTSes like Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes have introduced. The paid-for system makes non-payers into second-class citizens, much like Archlord promised to do Back In The Day. It's not great to look at. The MMO side doesn't add much except an opportunity for micropayments and is pretty much a glorified multiplayer mode.

What's good about it? The research system and the online city management is fun. It's very low-spec. Um. The script isn't too bad. It's free (except if you want to buy an advantage through a premium account), so even if the tone of this review puts you off, you can still try it.