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Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern

Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Dont waste your money
Review: This game plays terrible! This game has fixed cameras so it is very easy to walk off camera. Then you have to guess which way to turn or walk to get back into camera site. At first I could not get this game to play on my computer but after ONLY 2 weeks of e-mails to their tec department and a new sound card I got it to play. Funny thing, My sound card worked fine on ALL of my other games.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Could/Should Be SO Much Better
Review: This game was very fun in the offset, because everything is textured and colored wonderfully, and every new area is eye dazzeling. However, the game-play itself leaves MUCH to be desired. It's as if Ubi Soft released this game half done. It's extremely buggy, some parts of the story line completely disapear never to be explained, the character's voices will cut in and out during dialog, and my biggest complaint is getting stuck in the middle of the game due to a BUG!!! Also, the fighting system is a basic point and click. Click short for small attack, click longer for larger attack. Boring! This game could be so much fun if it had been finished by it's creator. Even with all of the un-fun bugs, this game still has potential if you're a huge Dragonrider fan like myself. Despite everything, I have stuck with this game for the love of Anne McCaffrey and the amazing world of the Dragonriders that she's created. It's like playing through a book in the series. However, there are lots of discrepancies here too. If you are a fan, you'll be disapointed by what appears to be the lack of the programmer's knowledge of Pern, it's culture, and it's social-political structure. Over all, I liked playing through a video novel, but the patience required may be too much to ask from some players. If you're a fan, go for it! If you're not, don't bother. :)

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Could/Should Be SO Much Better
Review: This game was very fun in the offset, because everything is textured and colored wonderfully, and every new area is eye dazzeling. However, the game-play itself leaves MUCH to be desired. It's as if Ubi Soft released this game half done. It's extremely buggy, some parts of the story line completely disapear never to be explained, the character's voices will cut in and out during dialog, and my biggest complaint is getting stuck in the middle of the game due to a BUG!!! Also, the fighting system is a basic point and click. Click short for small attack, click longer for larger attack. Boring! This game could be so much fun if it had been finished by it's creator. Even with all of the un-fun bugs, this game still has potential if you're a huge Dragonrider fan like myself. Despite everything, I have stuck with this game for the love of Anne McCaffrey and the amazing world of the Dragonriders that she's created. It's like playing through a book in the series. However, there are lots of discrepancies here too. If you are a fan, you'll be disapointed by what appears to be the lack of the programmer's knowledge of Pern, it's culture, and it's social-political structure. Over all, I liked playing through a video novel, but the patience required may be too much to ask from some players. If you're a fan, go for it! If you're not, don't bother. :)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Pern is so real!!
Review: This is the first time Pern fans have been able to get a realistic view of Pern! As a dragonrider, you can run around Pern performing tasks and saving Pern from yet another plague. Now while the game designers ai did not catch every correct detail of Pern or its creatures, this is the closest you can get outside your imagination! The game runs pretty smooth and has a lot to do. The music and graphics are excellant. I always enjoyed going from one place to another on Zenth, my bronze dragon. The sequence of mounting the dragon is unavoidable and is always cool to watch. I finished the game in about 18 hours, and I played it rather fast, so there is not really any lack of things to do. Play it slow, do everything, and enjoy it!!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Enjoyable
Review: Well, I have followed the development of this game for nearly 5 years with much anticipation. It was inevitable that my expectations would be too high so I have allowed for this in my rating.

It ran just fine on a P2-300 celeron processor but I do have a heap of ram (296Mb) and a cheapo 3d accelorator video card.

Gameplay Problems:

Very occasional freeze-ups (perhaps 2 per completed game)
Occasionally the camera fails to properly track D'kor
Inconsistency between audio and text dialogue
Names of some NPC's just don't match up (Forn in the smithhall unaccountably referred to as Klor by all other NPC's?)
Unable to truncate or skip quite long cinematic sequences when travelling between areas (likewise with npc dialogue)
Too much time waiting for areas to load and unload :(

Pernese Consistency Issues.

Dragons are supposes to be 6 fingered, in the game are five fingered.
The 'Temple' on Ierne Island might raise hackles with McCaffrey diehards
The Smithcraft Hall erroneously called 'Mastersmith Hall'
The dragons look a little deep chested to me ;)

Gameplay Good points:

Great storyline!
Great visual setting
Great musical accompaniment
Easy fighting system to get to grips with
Impressive cinematics, particulary after the first 'chapter'
Relatively cheap price!
Reasonable length (20 hours of elapsed gamplay my first time through)
Enough little sidequests unfinished to make me want to play again to achieve the maximum status

Pernese Consistency Bonuses:

Great eyecandy for pern lovers!
The dragons are /huge/ as they should be.
Mostly rates excellent for consistency with one or two small exceptions (some of which were obviously necessary to make this a good rpg plot).
Have I mentioned great eyecandy for pern lovers?
The feel of the game is a pretty good approximation of the Pern books IMO, the visuals and audio are just right.
The storyline is of a high enough quality that Ms McCaffrey would likely approve IMO
If you play any online pern rpg's this game will revitalise your concepts of Pern :)

Biggest regret about this game? Just that it isn't an online world ;)


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