As far as hooks go, you could do a whole lot worse than offering to let gamers play as a dragon who wears a jetpack, and for many this single image alone will be enough to convince them to put down coin for Larian Studios' new RPG/RTS steampunk fantasy game Divinity: Dragon Commander. Split into three different game phases - a point-and-click exploration of your ship and its inhabitants, a Risk-style world map around involves strategically placing units in turn-based gameplay, and sprawling battlefields where forward-thinking is crucial - Divinity: Dragon Commander is clearly trying to appeal to gamers of widely varying preferences and sensibilities.
Though the three separate gameplay phases are tied together and balanced quite well, the RPG elements of Divinity: Dragon Commander are significantly more understated than the RTS game mechanics. The player character's background, for example, is fixed: you are the bastard son of the recently deceased Emperor Sigurd I and a beautiful woman called Aurora, who was a dragon in disguise. When the old emperor is betrayed and murdered by your more legitimate siblings, you are tasked with defending the kingdom from their squabbles and drives towards expansion.
Character customization is limited to picking one of three dragon types, and the remainder of the role-playing is relegated to making decisions about political and social policies, such as whether or not to legalize doctor-prescribed narcotics, or to start taxing the region's rich and powerful church. Of course, the player's actual approach to battles and choosing skills to invest in also allow for a greater sense of connectedness with the character (will you research the best machinery available and command from a distance, or dive in headfirst and start flinging fireballs?) but since going to one extreme or the other is a surefire way to make things extremely difficult for yourself, most players would end up taking a middle-ground approach.
Lest it be thought that Divinity: Dragon Commander is all about sending machines to blow up other machines, there is plenty of political intrigue and a real need for diplomacy in the background, and Larian also attempts to tie real-world political issues in with the fantasy gameplay. The council members and generals from the various species encountered will demand answers to major questions, such as whether or not to introduce conscription, or a state-funded healthcare system, or the legalization of gay marriage.
Had it been implemented a little better, this could have been a great way of tying Divinity: Dragon Commander to the contemporary politics of the culture that produced it, but instead the dialogue feels a little clumsy, and the characterization even more so. More or less every NPC you encounter is a caricature, and this inevitably colors the issues for which they are arguing the pros or cons. One general asks to amend the wage gap between the male and female soldiers, which might seem reasonable enough, but this comes only after she's already established as a man-hating harridan who spouts insulting generalizations about all males at the faintest provocation. Likewise, the Dwarf leader disapproves of universal health care, but is also portrayed as a wealthy and tight-fisted aristocrat with no care for the common worker.
In a blog post earlier this year, Larian CEO Swen Vincke opened up a little about the difficulties of working such sensitive issues into a game, and emphasized the fact that the writing is supposed to be "satirical." In some places this does come across and makes for some some simple but genuine laughs, such as a newspaper voicing complaints from the people about your "gotta catch 'em all" attitude to warfare. A lot of the enjoyment of the humor will likely depend on your personal tolerance of reference-based gags that don't amount to much more than quoting geek-favorite games or movies (yes, there's an "arrow in the knee" joke).
If Larian was interested in stoking the fires of controversy then they will most likely succeed, but for gamers who play fantasy games as a means of escapism, it might be a little depressing to see the same subjects that trigger feuds during family dinners cropping up in their silly, fun dragon-with-a-jetpack RTS game. That's not to say that subjects like sexism, racism and economics can't be tackled through the medium of fantasy fiction, but Divinity: Dragon Commander would probably have benefited from abstracting such issues to fit within the framework of their invented universe a little more.
In the eventuality that you decide you don't want to think about Obamacare in between sending imp-made zeppelins to conquer a tract of elf country, Divinity: Dragon Commander's multiplayer campaign contains everything that the singleplayer mode does, with the exception of the story. Here, the focus is all about ensuring that your team colors engulf the entire world map, and this is the area where Divinity: Dragon Commander really shines.
The battles are genuinely thrilling and can be extremely tense, aided in no small part by the verbal feedback from the troops and by Divinity: Dragon Commander's artfully-composed soundtrack. The gameplay is designed in a way that makes it possible to recover from even the most hopeless of situations, and likewise it is possible to be on the edge of victory only to find that one wrong move forces you to flee with your tail between your legs and massive losses to your army. Battles can be won quickly and ruthlessly, or drawn out until only the last exhausted scraps from each side remain.
Even if players skip the story, there is plenty of raw material to build up their own narrative; for example, if hypothetically you should happen to start out the game with no clue what you're supposed to do, there's a kind of dry humor to be found in hearing a lieutenant cry out, "We have no reason to doubt your abilities, sire!" as you try out your jetpack and immediately faceplant into a mountain, oblivious to the enemy troops engulfing one of your nearby encampments. Hearing soldiers become panicked as they are surrounded on all sides and crying out to you in tones of betrayal lends an atmosphere of horrific tragedy to the battle reminiscent of Spec Ops: The Line, as does the potential to deplete a country's entire able-bodied population by allowing them to become slaughtered in the territorial scrap.
To add a little fuel to this grim fire, morphing into a dragon will cost twenty new recruits from the pool of army reserves, and though it's not stated explicitly this probably means that you eat them. There's no room to be squeamish however, as entering the dragon form to support troops, sabotage the opponent's resources or attack enemy units directly will frequently turn the tide of a battle. The dragon's movement animations can be a little stilted and clumsy, but if using the jetpack sends you hurtling into a frankly quite beautiful high-speed flight across the valleys, rivers and mountains of the disputed land.
The secondary and most commonly used form is that of a giant, floating, invisible, telepathic eyeball capable of spying on any part of the map, zooming in or out to focus on a particular skirmish or take a look at the big picture, and delivering commands with a single thought. It's advisable to stick with this form whenever trying to command your troops in battle; it's possible to do this as a dragon as well, but not with the same degree of efficiency.
Divinity: Dragon Commander definitely shouldn't be missed for fans of real-time strategy, excelling at the art of tense and exciting battles where planning and in-depth knowledge of available resources is essential. If you were only really interested in the story and RPG elements then the game will most likely leave you feeling a little dissatisfied, but you can always blow up some zeppelins and then fly away into the sunset to cheer yourself up.
Divinity: Dragon Commander is available on PC now from Steam, GOG, Larian Vault and Gamersgate.