Dragonkin: The Banished Review

Dragonkin: The Banished is an action RPG in the vein of Diablo, but this time there’s lots of dragons. Seriously, the dragons here are so bad and evil that their blood has corrupted the world, giving you the singular purpose to hunt them all down and defeat the Dragon Lords. This naturally means there are big monsters to fight, there’s loot to collect, and experience to gain.

The core of Dragonkin is excellent. It controls very well whilst you’re slashing, crushing, and magicking through groups of enemies, all fluid and responsive. Your skills are powerful and punchy, sending enemies flying once you destroy them, which is very satisfying. Though enemies do seem to just throw themselves in a direction when they die sometimes, even when dying of something with no impact, like poison, which feels a little silly. It’s a bit when you see stabilised footage of Star Trek ships under attack.

It looks great whilst you’re tearing things up without a frame stutter during gameplay, though there’s occasionally a brief hiccup during a cutscene. It’s not mind-blowing exactly, but the environments in particular are a real highlight, especially when you find a panorama that swoops the camera through the area to show it off.

The most interesting part of the game is the skill system. You don’t unlock skills when you level up, but instead find them either amongst your usual loot or as rewards for completing quests. Then you can slot them into a hex grid to determine your skills. The trick is that you can also place other bonuses that can interact with these skills next to them. These can be as simple as making the skill deal more damage, or providing a boost to attack speed when you use it, or even triggering a whole other ability in the form of Wyrmling skills. These skills, which are actually cast by the baby dragon you’ve got following you around, which can involve shooting balls of lightning, or summoning a second little dragon to attack enemies for a bit, or casting a buff on the player.

It’s a very customisable system that allows you quite a bit of creativity when building your character. You can only have five skills equipped at once, so the rest of the hex grid – which gets bigger as you level up – must be devoted to additional bonuses. The skills themselves can also be boosted up to level four depending on how many buffs it has activated. It’s incredibly satisfying to customise your skills like this. One of my skills, which has my character jump backwards whilst dropping a trap, was mostly being used to get out of large groups of enemies, so I added a buff to attack speed and damage when it is triggered, to help clear out that large group, and an upgrade for the toxic damage the trap deals as well.

You can add extra projectiles to ranged attacks or have a skill to teleport you back to where you were when it was first triggered, whilst Wyrmling skills can add chain lightning to other skills. The only issue is that there aren’t enough of these base skills. You’ll keep finding the skills you already have with different hexes attached to provide different bonuses to it, but it’ll be sooner rather than later that you tire of picking them up. Sorting through them all is a pain as well, all just icons and colours to represent rarity, all grouped together in a hex grid, it could be much less fiddly than it is.

The gear has this problem as well, but the bigger issue is that it’s just a bit boring. There’s lots of loot, but the vast majority of what you find will be a large downgrade on what you have – you could be losing hundreds of points of armour or damage. I’ve found a few legendaries, but they’re incredibly underwhelming as they don’t really provide much on top of a rare item, just a small stat boost or skill point. This is perhaps the game’s biggest issue, as once you’ve got the skills you want and some decent items, all the stuff that drops is just more junk to sift through for an hour or two until an actual upgrade finally drops. Additionally, decoupling skills from the levelling up system means that all you do when you level up is assign four attribute points that feel like they do almost nothing.

Dragonkin’s story is… convoluted. It’s not that it isn’t interesting, it’s just very wordy and drawn out, so you kind of lose track of what’s going on and why. It also takes place over environments that are frankly too large with too little enemy variety within them. I actually found myself just running straight through some areas and ignoring enemies because it was taking so long and had become too repetitive. Some of the voice acting is a bit weak as well, though performances are good and even great when they need to be – the big bad dragons are suitably imposing.

Whilst you’re levelling yourself up, you also have Montescail, a city that will level up alongside you. The game describes this as developing a city, but you’re basically just choosing between upgrades. There’s no placing buildings on a grid or resource management beyond upgrade points that you assign. There are a lot of things to add to the city, a shop of course, ring crafting, Wyrmling armour crafting, enchanting weapons, and so on. You can fast travel around this city by pressing the right analog stick, which causes the camera to immediately zoom out to show the whole city, and choosing somewhere to fast travel to, immediately zooming back in. This isn’t a big thing, but it looks very impressive.

If you do try Dragonkin, you’ll probably want to turn the difficulty up a bit. There are a few balancing issues, one being that one of my skills that rains arrows down in an area is wildly overpowered to the point where I can get through most bosses using entirely that one skill. Perhaps due to this, the game is on the easy side, though I did stumble onto difficulty spikes when facing some bosses. Not always though, and they still usually they just melt beneath a hail of my arrows whilst I stay away from them.