Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard [PC]

For five years and three games, Liquid Entertainment has come tantalizingly close to making some really good real-time strategy games. So you might figure that this time they finally made something good. You'd be wrong. Dragonshard isn't just good -- it's superb.

Although it shares elements of many RTSs, including Dawn of War, Kohan, Battle for Middle Earth, and of course, Warcraft III, the game's not content to merely borrow. Instead, it twists bits and pieces from other games into something new and distinct rather than merely derivative. Dragonshard is nothing if not unique.

To appreciate it, you have to understand that this is an action-oriented RTS. Before you dismiss it for requiring too much micromanagement, you have to understand that it's built around the idea that the most important resources in an RTS isn't gold, wood, mana, or ore; it's your attention.

Without you actually clicking on the buttons to build your units and move them to the right place at the right time, even the best run economy will collapse. Some games focus your attention on unit management, some on economics, and some on strategy, but the limits of your attention are always a crucial component of how an RTS works. Dragonshard carefully builds this idea into the combat, the exploration, and the resource management, all of which are intertwined.

The combat is based on fairly small numbers of units (although overland battles can look a lot more epic than they really are, thanks to experienced units having sub-units). The meat of the game comes from how every unit acquires special abilities as you level them up and becomes not only more powerful, but more flexible.

Some powers have an autocast option, but most of them you'll have to use manually, choosing when and on whom to use them. Over the course of the game, all your units learn new powers when they level up, which creates additional options for how units fight and interact with each other.

The exploration isn't just a matter of sending out scouts to run a set of waypoints. There's a lot of combat with neutral monsters who will drop gold and goodies that you'll have to manually pick up. And while it might be fair game to complain that your units won't automatically pick up resources, it's worth noting that your army has to take time to gather, during which it's vulnerable to attack. There are no villagers or peons here. Instead, your army does the yeoman's work, collecting crystals that periodically fall from the sky and gold that's scattered throughout dungeons. And since you'll desperately need both crystals and gold, you have to strike a balance between two separate areas.

This means the split map gimmick is far more than just a gimmick. There are important gameplay differences between the two levels. Experienced units get followers when they're above ground, but they have to go solo underground. There are more monsters underground, which are a prime source of experience points, but also a potential threat. Underground is also the only place you can find the Artifacts of Light that are one of the game's victory conditions. Flying units, who can range freely across the overland map, aren't allowed underground. Other games have featured separate underground areas, but none have managed to wring so much gameplay from the split levels.

Resources are distributed so that it's almost guaranteed that players will have to fight for them, and they're carefully balanced so that you'll rarely have enough to do everything you want. This is a game about making hard choices. In most RTSs, you work your way up a tech tree to unlock units. But Dragonshard offers a broad choice of units from the start; none of them have to be researched or unlocked. Instead, you build whatever you want and then use your hard-won experience points to advance the units of your choice.

There's limited building spaces in the cities, which use a grid system to either improve units with monuments or allow them to advance by constructing blocks of the same buildings. Dragonshard has no optimal build strategy because there are so many build strategies, each of which is only as good as how they match up with what the other players are doing.

Dragonshard is also very good at avoiding stalemates. With a variety of victory conditions and some powerful "juggernaut" units, it's rarely a matter of simply amassing a lot of guys and rolling over the enemy. It's easy to rebuild an army quickly and it's easy to defend a city, so you'll have to either starve your opponent out or outmaneuver him with one of the victory conditions. Surprise come-from-behind victories aren't uncommon.

One of the strengths of Dragonshard is how well it captures the flavor of Dungeons & Dragons, even though it's built around some newfangled campaign called Eberron. The dungeons are full of D&D favorites like beholders, driders, ettins, and dragons. The gelatinous cube is a particularly amusing monster especially dangerous to lone rogues creeping around and cleaning up treasure chests that have been left behind.

At first, the three sides seem steeped in Ebberon's esoteric fantasy trappings, but they basically boil down to the humans, the lizards, and the dark race. Within each side, there are multiple races, creatures, and even robots called warforges. And although the sides share some basics (everyone has a flying unit, a resource gatherer, a rogue, a ranged unit, a few melee units, and a few spellcasters), there are some significant differences in the skills they have and the way they progress.

The single-player game is a pair of serviceable campaigns that let you earn points to buy magic items between missions. This item vault adds some continuity to what would otherwise be a typically goofy fantasy story with polygonal characters and overwrought voice acting.

The real strength of the game is its skirmish mode and multiplayer. There are some bugs with larger units getting stuck in the geometry, some sync errors, a few mission scripting problems, and larger battles can cause slowdowns. But hopefully, Liquid Entertainment and Atari will patch these issues, because Dragonshard is a good enough game to be a contender in the long run.

Dragonshard is an ingenious mix of resource management, micromanagement, action, RPG elements, tactics, strategy, innovation, and good old-fashioned D&D atmosphere.