Elva the Eco Dragon
While the concept of a dragon teaching how to care for our environment sounds cute, the game seems to be in need of some cleanup of its own first.
Note: This review was written Feb. 7, 2021 and published originally at SaveOrQuit.com on Feb. 11, 2021 prior to the release of version 1.5.
As a professional educator in the scientific study of the natural world, Elva the Eco Dragon seemed like a game with high potential to dovetail nicely with my day job. Unfortunately, what seemed to be a cute and engaging 3D action-adventure on the surface fails to go deeper in terms of gameplay experience or learning.
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time Singleplayer Games.
War Room
I’m going to make this very brief under the assumption you are a busy person like me. This game has a lot of potential and some unique and interesting mechanics. That being said however, you can very clearly feel the pressure the devs were under to release this game, as it is riddled with some extremely basic bugs that should have been caught at the alpha and beta testing phases (update: while very basic bugs are fixed, statement holds true overall).
This game is labeled as a completed product and sold at “full price”, but it really feels like an early access title that could be wiped under the rug and forgotten about. It would be a total shame if that were to happen, as I said earlier, this game has a lot of potential. However, the devs really need to hop on some of these basic issues.
– Real player with 31.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time Simulation Games.
Pros
To start off, the whole concept of this game is amazing and is going in the right direction. You get a tutorial at the beginning of the game to show you how things work, how to send troops on missions, use supports, even do supply runs and so on. I’ve seen people say this game is too easy but once you’ve completed the tutorial you are on your own and if you push too hard too fast you will loose troops, vehicles, and security / popularity in sectors, ultimately resulting in a loss or at the very least put you in a hard spot. There are multiple different missions / events to do in this game so far from doing recon on possible suicide bombers in town to scouting for enemy camps to sending troops on patrols and hearts and minds missions and more. Your troops will get ambushed quite often (more on this in cons) so you cant just send out two guys in a HMMWV. The further you progress you will capture more bases and have to manage reallocating troops and vehicles as well as supplies. This is not like Wargame, for example, where you control individual units and tell them what to attack, this is more of a laid back commander role, you will tell troops to go somewhere and from there they will engage how they see fit (More on this in cons), you can help them out with air support but that’s about it. The camera controls are a little funky and something I havent really seen before but once you play around with it for a while you get the feel for it and it becomes almost natural (More on this in cons). The camera has 3 different visions, Electro Optical (EO) or just you standard view if you will, White Hot, and Iron Bow (another type of thermal), these views are very nice and useful during the nightime and work very well during the day as well, only small complaint is that troops are just big glares in White hot mode, other than that it’s really well done.
– Real player with 16.0 hrs in game