Overview
Replay the classic arcade game from the palm of your hand. Ported to the iPhone with gorgeously enhanced animation and graphics you take control of the valiant knight, Dirk the Daring. Battle your way through massive worlds, crazy puzzles, and even fight a fire-breathing dragon as you attempt to rescue the beautiful Princess Daphne.
Features
This game relies on your quick reflexes to get past each obstacle. This is done by tapping the appropriate button at the correct time. Timing is everything here so you have a few options as far as how big or small you’d like the buttons to be displayed on the screen.
There are also two different modes of gameplay as well, Home and the Arcade version. The home version is a replica of the laserdisc version of the game and it includes addition scenes.
Breakdown
The Good:
Just look at the screen shots here. Any guess what the “Good” will be? Okay, enough of that nonsense. Yes, the graphics in this game look amazing. The animation has been cleaned up significantly and it shows here.
The Bad:
The biggest flaw of this game has to be the controls. They really do not work very well at all. This game is all about timing and regardless of when you tap the buttons, you will ultimately find yourself replaying the same levels or obstacles over and over again.
It seems the controls are just not an intuitive as they should be. You will swear you hit the button at the right moment, but the game will not recognize it at times. It gets very frustrating and you will most likely want to put the game down rather than replaying the same part over and over again.
The Verdict
Although the game looks great, it feels like that is all the devs really focused on with this one. This feels like a very rushed port of a classic game. Again, it looks great, but the gameplay and controls do not make this worth five dollars. I’d wait for either a price reduction, which EA always does, or a Free version first.
Our Rating
Dragon's Lair
- Developer: Electronic Arts
- Category: Games
- Released: 12-07-09
(currently 11.19.09)
(currently 4.99)
“This game is all about timing and regardless of when you tap the buttons, you will ultimately find yourself replaying the same levels or obstacles over and over again.
It seems the controls are just not an intuitive as they should be. You will swear you hit the button at the right moment, but the game will not recognize it at times…”
Sadly this sounds exactly like the mechanic of the original coin-op. “I could have sworn I pushed the joystick to the right! Oh well, someone loan me another fifty cents, okay?”
Nonetheless I shall wait for a price redux and scoop this one up.
Steve-O: I was going to say the exact same thing.
Back when Dragon’s Lair first came out, the coin-op version I had access to was set to being pretty easy to get through. They had little dip switches in the back that could be set to make the game easy or very hard to play. Easy being a relative term here.
When it first came out, I was able to get through the game after only spending about $20 worth of quarters.
After a while, the owner of the arcade set the switches to the hard setting and I was never able to get to the end of the game again.
It sounds like EA decided to set the dip switches to hard for this release. Now, I haven’t played the game myself yet, so I can’t say for sure. If the game is sluggish when playing, I can see that being a big problem. However, I don’t see where the reviewer states that there are any issues with the game playing on the iPhone/iPod touch.