Despite having had a sort of blueprint for decades, top-down action role-playing games are a little hard to get right. Ever since the release of the original Diablo and its wildly more popular sequel, many games have attempted to replicate the experience crafted by Blizzard, and only a handful succeeded at providing satisfying experiences powered by the simple core gameplay loop of exploring dungeons, defeating enemies, obtaining new loot, improving character build to take on even more difficult challenges. Still, Path of Exile and a few other games proved that it is possible to challenge the dominance of the Diablo series by offering what ARPG players really want, which often involves a good wealth of customization options.
While it is too early to say if Eko Software’s Dragonkin: The Banished will indeed be able to offer an experience that will please fans of the genre, the potential is most definitely there. The Early Access version currently only features the very first chapter of the adventure and some endgame activities that will likely get expanded once the game hits its 1.0 version, but what can be experienced is definitely promising, even in its current rough state.
As those who tried the game’s recent demo already know, Dragonkin: The Banished offers right from the beginning the chance to see the power level that the game’s four characters will be able to reach, taking advantage of a prologue that sets the story up, detailing how the world was corrupted by the blood of dragons that is causing monstrous creatures to rise from the depths of the earth. While these characters do fall into the ARPG archetypes that are found in pretty much every game in the genre, they feel diverse enough. The Knight, for example, combines offense and defense for a varied playstyle; the Oracle utilizes elemental magic with different ranges and AOEs while also offering surprisingly good mobility options; the Barbarian hits harder and harder when the Rage value increases, showing his true strength when overwhelmed by enemy hordes. A fourth character that falls into the Ranger/Rogue archetype is also briefly available during the prologue but is not yet available for the main adventure.
While dominating enemies in the prologue using these prebuilt godlike heroes is fun for a short while, the prologue alone doesn’t do a great job at highlighting some of the features that set Dragonkin: The Banished apart from similar games, as it only becomes possible to access the main menu, and thus the many customization options the game has to offer, only a few minutes after selecting the character among the Knight, Oracle and Barbarian, and reaching the City of Montescail, which serves as the main hub. One of these features is the Ancestral Grid, a massive grid that comes with different shapes that depend on the character it belongs to, and a huge number of nodes that are progressively unlocked as the character levels up, where it is possible to place Fragments, items collected from enemies that represent character skills and modifiers. What makes this system very interesting is how modifiers all have some pretty unique shapes that fit into multiple nodes and can affect multiple character skills depending on the placement, turning skill customization into a sort of engaging puzzle game that requires some serious optimization to get the best out of any modifier. The modifiers themselves look varied enough, as they grant tons of different properties to skills, including damage and speed boosts, so it definitely feels like the system has a ton of potential, even in its very first iteration.
Another feature that sets Dragonkin: The Banished apart from other ARPGs is the ability to bring a Wyrmling along, a small companion dragon that can be chosen among four different ones that come with their own unique elements, bonus attributes, and skills. Interestingly enough, the Wyrmlings’ skills are also placed on the Arcane Grid and can be influenced by regular modifiers, further increasing customization options. In addition, when a character skill is affected by 8 or more modifiers, it enters Symbiosis with the currently equipped Wyrmling, increasing its power and granting it the elemental properties of the companion dragon. Achieving this requires perfect optimization of the Arcane Grid, which further makes the customization system way more involving than simply equipping skills and activating modifiers.
Even when it comes to its main hub, Dragonkin: The Banished attempts to do something slightly different from the norm. Instead of offering every possible service right at the start of the game, the City of Monstescail will evolve based on its Prosperity Level, which is increased by visiting the world and defeating major Dragons. Besides the Jeweler, who can produce rings with items looted after defeating enemies, the Apothecary, who can upgrade potions, and the Dark Merchant, who buys from the player unwanted items, more services will be added in future versions of the game to give players even more reasons to fully explore the world and increase the city’s prosperity.
Despite being in Early Access, Dragonkin: The Banished already offers plenty of replay value, with multiple difficulty levels that also increase rewards and quality of loot, and proper endgame activities like hunts, unique quests of variable durations, difficulty, and rewards, and Dungeon Purification, where the player has to close a rift at the end of dungeons. All of these activities allow the player to push the limits of the current gameplay systems to the maximum, allowing them to get their hands on powerful loot and Fragments, although, with potentially huge changes on the horizon, spending too much time on these activities may not be very worthwhile right now.
The potential big changes coming to Dragonkin: The Banished in the future aren’t the only thing that may not make it worthwhile for most players to start playing the game right away in its first iteration. The unfinished user interface, plenty of bugs, including some progression blockers that, at least, are not critical, textures loading in seconds after a new area is loaded, missing resolution options suddenly becoming available, wonky controller support and general lack of the most basic polish are only some of the issues that suggest the game wasn’t exactly ready for even an Early Access release, so it may be wise to wait for a few patches before diving in.
In its first few minutes, Dragonkin: The Banished gives off a feeling of “been there, done that already”, but the gameplay systems that come into play as the player sets off in the game’s corrupted world hint at greater things to come, even in their current rough state. Eko Software is committed to updating its game with new features, and I’m really interested to see how the game’s decent foundation will be improved in the future before its proper 1.0 release and if all the improvements will truly be able to set the game apart from the likes of Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2.
Early Access code provided by the publisher.
