Lay Waste To Everything In Sight In MiniDragon
MiniDragon ($1.99) by Madman Theory Games is an action arcade game where the goal is to burn everything in sight in order to stay alive.
I had high hopes for this game, because a fire-breathing dragon that gets to destroy everything in its path? Completely awesome. While I loved the concept, ultimately, I was disappointed with the gameplay.
The goal is to play as a little dragon, shooting fire at attacking plants or zombies. This is a dual stick shooter, so your dragon is controlled with one stick and his fire breathing is controlled with the other. You can jump by tapping a button above the shoot button. I didn’t love these controls on my iPad (especially the jump placement), because they were a bit unwieldy, but they were better on my iPhone.
When the game begins, you’re dumped into an arena, where giant one-eyed flowers rush at you. The gameplay ended up being both too easy and too difficult, because it starts out slowly but ramps up too quickly, until you’re swarmed with enemies. I thought normal mode was overly difficult, but you can also change to easy mode for less of a challenge or to hard mode if you’re not getting enough of a challenge.
Each arena has a goal that you need to complete to unlock new game content, such as reaching a certain score. Your first goal will be to earn 1,500 points, which actually takes quite awhile. Points are earned through slaying flowers, and because there’s only one type of enemy in each arena, the gameplay quickly gets monotonous.
There are a few power ups to collect, which are the most fun part of the game. They ramp up your fireballs (which have a surprisingly short range for a dragon), giving you multi-fireballs, or radiating fireballs, which lay waste to the enemies around you.
Finishing a level will unlock new arenas, with other goals and other monsters. For example, one arena is filled with strange looking zombies, but none of the arenas have enough content variation. I would like to see several types of dragon attacks and many different enemies to defeat in order to make this game more dynamic.
At this time, the game only has arena gameplay, which makes it quite limited. I was bored after a few minutes, but the developers do have more in the works, including a single player campaign and multiplayer gameplay.
If you’re a fan of arcade-style games and like fast-paced, challenging gameplay, this might be worth a download. Just keep in mind that it’s currently quite basic, and may not be worth the full purchase price until an update with more content is available.
