Divinity: Dragon Commander

[IamLEAM1983]

It's a StarCraft II total conversion. It's a Magic : The Gathering card set. It's RISK in a Fantasy world and it's Civilization V's diplomacy elements expanded. It's an RPG and an aerial combat simulator in the same vein as Panzer Dragoon. Dragon Commander seems poised to be several things for different people and the end result feels a bit mitigated, if generally solid.

The game starts in the boilerplate Fantasy world of Rivellon, a place where Tolkien's races collide with early Victorian social climates and technological innovations. It's a world that seems rife for a Storybook Steampunk tale, but it instead tells a yarn involving a house divided. Your five brothers have absconded from your father's rule, the rightful king is dead, and you're the only remaining contender for the throne of Emperor (or Empress, obviously). Rivellon has long since been ruled over by a single governing body, so that body splintering up allows for old enmities and ancient ideological clashes to resurface. Everyone looks up to you, a human born with the ability to transform into a dragon, to make the right choices that will restore Rivellon to its former glory.

The game is divided in several distinct subsystems, allow you to portion off those areas of the game you enjoy the most from those you don't. Starting out with your capital province and a meagre selection of troops, it's your job to bring either the pen or the sword to surrounding lordships. Each ruler that joins your side comes with its own advisor, itself coming with his or her culture's specific wants and needs. Oberon the Elf might eventually mention the need for you to approve of gay marriage in order to keep your troops' morale boosted in difficult times, while Yorrick the Lich will righteously spout negativist rhetoric you'd swear is being ripped out of nut-job groups like the Westboro Baptist Church or the “REAL” Women of Canada. It's all animated and beautifully scripted, giving you the sense that your throne room only lets you see a fraction of the complete picture. I swear there's Game of Thrones-worthy backstabbings going on between the Gnomes and the Elves when I'm not looking, and I wouldn't be surprised if Yorrick's native religion involved a sort of Conservative Christianity à la Jack Skellington.

Y'know, like Jesusland, but a Jesusland where Jesus is just bones and is surrounded by super-Gothic furniture and stuff.

That's where the game's strength truly shines, as each adviser's position and general ideology is at least somewhat close to issues we might be familiar with thanks to History classes, or thanks to modern-day politics. Catherine, the former Empress, wants gender equality and equal pay rates. Your lizard-person adviser is a social conservative and looks to you as if you were a bastard who'd just been lucky enough to be born with the right blood and in the right house, his initial contempt and mistrust being quite palpable. Some guys want more scientific advancement, others want more religion, the elves are obviously environmentalists to the core while the gnomes are industrialists...

You quickly find out that you can't please everyone and that there are choices to make. Unlike Fable 3's attempt at the same mechanic, however, your choices do indeed matter. As in how they do; this is largely reflected in the kind of Action Cards you'll have for the RISK-like portions of the game, and in which units you have for the Real-Time Strategy segments. This is especially fun, as it means you absolutely can bungle your R&D and end up with an unwinnable war – even if you've been so much of a social permissive and progressive that your approval rate is through the roof.

This means that, sadly enough, you sometimes will have to rub elbows with sorts who don't quite match with your personal ideology because you're just that desperate for their offered superior firepower. That means ratifying edicts you might not believe in yourself, which in turn might mean pissing off allies you actually do hold near and dear to you. It's an oddly lucid take on strategy and diplomacy coming from a setup that's all elves and skeleton people and dragon people and whatnot.

Luckily, you don't have to wage all of your battles personally. You're entirely free to supervise everything involved in every engagement your forces will enter and you're especially free to take to your dragon form to lend support to your potentially beleaguered forces on a personal basis – but you can also rely on those same advisers. If, for whatever reason, you aren't ready to leave the political theatre of the Raven for your next turn, you can delegate commanding duties to whichever adviser seems to be better suited for the task at hand. Oberon is great for clashes involving masses of archers bypassing terrain deficiencies, while Yorrick is your dude if what you're looking for is to make death and disease rain down upon the forces of your dissident brothers. You can essentially play through the entire campaign without taking up a sword yourself and staying in the company of your advisers; but all this means is that Dragon Commander does the math for you and compares the overall efficiency of Adviser X with the odds of Battle Y. The adviser loses that virtual throw of the dice? Then the game computes your suffered losses as well as those of the opponent. Several minor scrapes can be dealt with like this, but there's very clear times where the game essentially says “Hey, player-person? You're missing out on the fun. Here's the wheel, go and torch some ballistae!”

The problem is that the game's inefficiencies start to surface when the Strategy aspects are tackled. There's very few distinct maps for you to fight over, so you'll be seeing the same snowy peaks and the same valleys over and over. Despite that, your units have a ho-hum path-finding algorithm that essentially rewards base Zerg Rush techniques. Oh, and the game's tutorial is laughable, only showing you about half of your total tools and the ways in which to use them. You're thrown into the thick of things all too quickly, as though the game were bored with showing you the ropes before you ever get the chance to land a comment about over-long tutorial segments.

Stay human and pump out a fuckton of units to throw them at the enemy's gates, or belay all forms of military production and hope your dragony self qualifies as a WMD? Decisions, decisions...

As of course, everything needs to be upgraded over time. Your units, your abilities and Action Cards, your throne room – everything right down to your scaly alternate body. New projection abilities must be researched, you need to be buffed up at regular intervals by researching dragon armour – and you'll be glad you did, seeing as the game's flight controls are iffy when pulling hair-pin turns is required. You're great for long, swooping changes in direction that eventually see you headed where you want to go, but you're not too hot once one of your dragon brothers decides to go on full-on Dogfight Mode.

Still, the visual spectacle is pretty cool. Dragons chasing one another while tiny armies wage war underneath 'em, the big lizards trying and generally failing at pulling “air drift” manoeuvres to change directions quickly. It feels epic, and coming back to the Raven to get a glowing commendation from your favourite advisers is always fun.

The thing is, each individual set of mechanics feels like it wouldn't warrant its own game, and the Divinity series isn't so much steeped in mediocrity as the sort of sense that you're looking at the product of a whole damn lot of effort, but no real understanding of the chosen mechanics. It started with Divine Divinity and its... fairly ho-hum call-back to Diablo II to that one series' own sequels, until someone at the French dev-and-publisher Larian Studios realized that sticking “divine” in front of the word “divinity” makes no sense.

“Hey, dude! I just bought the hot new title from such-and-such, Human Humanity! Sounds kickass, right? Right?!”

At which point Larian started working on the Divinity series, which essentially developed as an Elder Scrolls-esque customizable romp through Rivellon with a lot of good intentions but several buggy features standing as proof that they maybe bit off more than they could chew. Here, though, the balance seems perfected enough that you won't feel as though Dragon Commander's shortcomings makes the whole thing unplayable – especially when the Diplomacy segments are considered. The political role-playing is so deep and so enjoyable that the RTS package's problems are entirely redeemed, in my book. That also goes without mentioning the fact that it's not afraid to let me fuck up my winning conditions (thanks, XCOM, for reintroducing failure as a mechanic!) and, primarily – that it's not afraid to offer something new.

In a market that's dominated by numbered sequels and the same mechanics being delivered over and over under the guise of new map packs and star-studded casts, Dragon Commander feels fresh and new. It feels like it's confident enough to throw you a few curve-balls despite its own and occasional shortcomings, and it feels as though it wants you to experiment, to figure out your own winning strategy. You aren't guided by the hand, nobody's there to tell you what you can and can't do. Rivellon is a sociopolitical Petri dish, and you're entirely free to mess with it.

Plus, your dragon avatar has a jetpack.

A dragon with a jetpack.

Did your mind explode? If not, you have no soul.