Dragon Awaken Review

Dragon Awaken is a free browser-based fantasy MMORPG developed by Game Hollywood and published by Proficient City. The game was released on March 8, 2017.

Gameplay

Dragon Awaken is played from an isometric top-down perspective and switches to a side view during battle. The game is your standard point-and-click browser MMORPG and is controlled mostly via the mouse. To move your character, you click on the spot where you want your character to move into.

Character customization is non-existent. On first starting, you select your gender and your name, and that’s it. You don’t get to pick a class, nor do you get to customize your character’s appearance. Instead, every player has access to all classes at once. You can freely switch back and forth between them during the game which alters the current skill set.

Like many of the recent browser games, Dragon Awaken has a party based system. The player recruits heroes fight with during battle. Heroes level-up, but unlike your player character, they don’t automatically level-up after a battle. Instead, you have to use an EXP scroll to level them up after a battle. A number of different heroes exist to spice up party combinations so there’s at least some customization of play there.

Dragon Awaken’s main feature unsurprisingly involves dragons – namely raising them. In battles, all players have access to a pet dragon that participates during battles. At the start, your dragon is small and looks like a cute pet, but by feeding them dragon dust they can evolve into a different form. There are six dragons available, each wielding a single element. Players start Dragon Awaken with the fire dragon. Lest you look down on this feature, it is more than just a glorified pet system. Dragons evolve over three forms, can be summoned outside of battle, and can be ridden as a flying mount.

Dragon Awaken is mostly PvE. The majority of the content like the dungeons and trials are instanced maps that require solo play. The main PvP content in this game is the Arena, which allows you to challenge other players to compete in rankings. Unfortunately, this is not actual PvP, as you don’t actually fight other players. Instead, you fight an AI controlled version of their party. Much like the rest of Dragon Awaken, this is hardly new to the browser MMO genre.

The Good

Perhaps the greatest appeal of Dragon Awaken lies in its graphics. They look great for a browser game. The battle animations are smooth and look natural. Some of the skills even have a cutscene movie that plays when you use them. It’s definitely at the top of the heap when it comes to browser games.

I do appreciate not having to pick one class. This allows you to change your skill set freely depending on the situation. Because of this, there’s no need to create multiple characters. Dragon Awaken is all about freedom and not creating roadblocks. This carries into the questing system which is super easy. Players can basically click on a quest and the game will automatically resolve it. It’s actually too easy so this is arguably a negative, but some will appreciate Dragon Awaken as an online game to play at work or school.

The Bad

The ads. Oh my. The ads are so bad. Every 5 minutes or so the game nags you with random ads urging you charge up your character with money. The ads are also pretty deceptive, most the time they just show you a super powerful item along with a button labeled claim. If you click on a claim, it goes directly to the payment screen. It’s an extremely deceptive bait-and-switch tactic.

The game is also buggy. While reviewing Dragon Awaken, I got stuck on some map with no way out. Even restarting the browser didn’t change anything. The game also sometimes loads the graphics incorrectly, so you might end up looking at a pixelated map.

And don’t bother asking for support. The game’s support system is horrible. It took them 10 days to answer my one question and even then, their answer was a generic boilerplate response. Now, the lack of support might be because I didn’t spend a dime on this game, but how can you trust them with your money if they can’t even be bothered to answer a simple question appropriately?

Dragon Awaken is a blatant cash grab. Pretty much every action in this game can be skipped if you have money and are willing to part with it. There are even multiple levels of VIP. VIPs have a lot of perks: better drops and faster EXP gain among other things. They can also recruit exclusive pay to win heroes who are, as you expect, super broken. There’s no way free players can stand against premium players.

Closing Thoughts

Dragon Awaken is browser-based MMORPG with a fantasy dragon theme that features a free-form class system along with vibrant, high-quality graphics. It’s not that unique, and it’s sadly full of ads and bugs. The nonexistent support doesn’t help either. I still enjoyed playing it some as something I could come back to every so often. It was just hard to stick with because of the nagging ads and pay to win vibe. Dragon Awaken might still appeal to you, but for most people there are better browser MMOs out there.