Tales from the Dragon Mountain
Score: 69% ESRB: 4+ Publisher: G5 Entertainment Developer: Cateia Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Tales from the Dragon Mountain has the potential to be a fun adventure game, but falls flat in enough places to make it a game that is better left unplayed. One of the first, and most notable, shortcomings is the game’s visuals. While the game claims HD graphics for the iPad, the backgrounds for each of the game’s locations are less than impressive and often filled with items too small to really see, or too dark to really see any kind of detail, yet somehow you are supposed to find and tap on in order to add them to your inventory. While Tales from the Dragon Mountain contains voice-acting, the dialogue is read with little or no emotion, at least not enough emotion to really convey some of the events that are happening around the main character. You would think that running into creatures like werewolves, nature spirits, dragons and creatures made of shadows would elicit more than just a slight raising of the voice, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. As for the rest of the game’s audio, both the sound effects and the background music fit the situation, but they are as generic as you can get and feel like something any gamer who has played an adventure title with a fantasy theme would have heard a dozen times before.
Gameplay: Tales from the Dragon Mountain is an adventure game that tries to appeal to the hidden object fanbase by giving gamers the option to list what inventory items they are looking for in each screen. This isn't required though, so those fans who prefer a purely adventure feel can look for the many necessary items on their own, but those same players might find that they are looking for more items than you would expect in a standard adventure title. Tales from the Dragon Mountain follows a young woman, Mina, who is returning to her grandmother's house long after the older woman died. It seems she feels drawn there by both her dreams and a strange medallion that her grandmother passed down not long before her death. When our heroine arrives, she quickly learns that some of the tall tales her grandmother told weren't as tall as she once believed. She is quickly rushed off to a strange land that her grandmother apparently protected up until her death. Since then, the land has fallen under the influence of the evil Strix. As Mina works her way through this very short story, she learns about her family's history and even her own magic, which is apparently performed via a match-three game like Puzzle Quest, but much simpler and only used twice in the whole game.
Difficulty: Unfortunately, Tales from the Dragon Mountain is not only a short game, but a rather easy one as well, at least for any experienced adventure gamer. The obstacles that the game throws at the player are a mixture of puzzles, as in putting pieces together to make a picture, and fairly low-level logic problems. Part of me feels that this game's casual nature means it should be forgiven this lower difficulty level, but I would be more forgiving if it was a longer game. As it is, Tales from the Dragon Mountain can be completed in only a couple of hours. The game offers a bit of customizability to make it more appealing to players who want the game to be more hidden object than adventure. These options turn on and off features like listing what items the player is looking for or displaying indicators on the screen over areas that the player can tap. The other options change the rate that the hint and skip options recharge.
Game Mechanics: As an adventure game, Tales from the Dragon Mountain offers up only the bare essentials. The player is presented with a story that doesn't have too much depth, but can put together a series of puzzles that never feel new or clever. So while the game does fit the definition of an adventure game, it isn't one worth exploring. Tales from the Dragon Mountain just doesn't have enough polish and depth to cause me to recommend it to even the most casual of adventure fans. It doesn't do anything technically wrong and it never crashed on me or displayed any bugs, it just feels more like a half-hearted attempt at an adventure game rather than a real investment of time and passion from the developers.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: Tales from the Dragon Mountain | iTunes
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