Dragonkin: The Banished (Early Access)

Dragonkin: The Banished was provided by Nacon for review. Thank you!

This is a review of an early access game; the content and performance of the game are subject to change.

Dragonkin: The Banished is a brand new Action RPG from Nacon, so brand new that it's still in Early Access right now. That being said, is the game worth picking up in its current state? Let's take a look at how the game currently holds up.

Dragonkin: The Banished starts with a rather lengthy prologue, which will run you through the story's premise and introduce the various factions and classes you'll be able to interact with. Unfortunately, as the game is in Early Access, the prologue is the only time you run into some of these, and you don't get the option to play as them once you make your character right now.

At first glance, Dragonkin: The Banished seems to take straight after games such as Diablo, Torchlight, and Path of Exile, and it pretty much does. If you've played those games, the UI is immediately familiar with the classic 2 "orbs" of health and mana pools. Your face buttons and the left analog stick for movement/aiming will dictate most of your attacks. So don't go into Dragonkin expecting innovation; the formula is generic.

A part of Dragonkin: The Banished that could be seen as innovative is that you have some control over the game's hub, the last bastion of humanity, Montescail. This allows you to upgrade parts of the city and thus gain access to new equipment and improve your abilities. It's a pretty neat mechanic, but the downside of this hub is that it's far too large for what it is, and most of it serves little purpose regarding gameplay, so you just end up fast-traveling around it all the time. Also, in Early Access, most of the upgrades are unavailable.

The same goes for the world in general in Dragonkin. The game feels very large and barebones right now, as if the developers have made the world and are now trying to make enough content to fill it rather than designing the world around the content. A large part of the game is simply walking from point A to point B in a straight line, occasionally encountering enemies that are quick to dispatch.

Dragonkin has a ton of difficulty levels; it's one of those games that starts numbering their difficulty levels because of how many there are, but playing on the default "Normal" setting is mind-numbingly easy. The combat of the Oracle class that I played consisted of holding the A button and pushing the stick in the direction of the enemy you wanted to defeat, I rarely ever took damage as the majority of enemies are melee and couldn't get close to me, and even the first dragon I fought died without getting me below half health once.

This might also partially be to do with the health potion mechanic, which lets you use a health potion every 8 seconds or so. You seem to have an unlimited amount of potions, so it's quite difficult to die, and even if you do die, respawning just gives you a small penalty to your max health until you visit a town again, allowing you to respawn straight back into the battle with no progress lost.

I understand feeling "powerful", but Dragonkin makes you feel way too powerful and way too quickly. I shouldn't be level 4 and able to dispatch hordes of bandits by holding a button; I should have a reason to use the dodge mechanic in the game.

The skill system is both interesting and a part of the problem, I feel. It allows you to create a grid of skills and place modifiers beside them on the grid to enhance those abilities. The right combination can make your character overpowered and incredible at Crowd Control, rendering the majority of enemies helpless against you.

Visually, the game is fine; it's not amazing, but it doesn't look bad either. The sound design follows suit with the rest of the game, though, and gets repetitive hearing the same sounds repeatedly as you fight.

If I sum up Dragonkin: The Banished in one word right now, it would be "generic". The gameplay feels like it's taken straight out of other Action RPGs, but with less... action. The world is mostly empty except for random pockets of enemies, but you could take a screenshot in a zone, and you wouldn't be able to tell where that screenshot was taken, because everywhere in each zone looks identical.

Things could improve here, but there needs to be a lot more content (I got to the current "end-game" in less than 8 hours) and a lot more balancing of skills and abilities if Dragonkin: The Banished wants to compete against the kind of strong competition it's up against.

Dragonkin: The Banished - Steam Deck Performance

Dragonkin: The Banished has the basics in place for Steam Deck, namely good controller support. It does support 1280x800 as a resolution, so there are no black borders.

It also has quite flexible graphics settings, but we need to run the settings pretty low for the Steam Deck to get acceptable performance here.

I'd recommend putting all the quality settings on "Low" except Textures, which can stay on "Medium"; you'll want to use TSR as the upscaling method, and 50% on your Resolution Scaling with no Dynamic Resolution, then use the in-game frame limiter to limit the game to 30 FPS.

With these settings, the game will mostly hold 30 FPS, but expect some severe drops in cutscenes and drops into the mid-20s occasionally in large battles. This is because the game gets quite CPU-heavy when a lot of enemies are on screen.

The power draw in the game varies depending on your area, but you should generally see around 12W-15W of usage in combat, with the city of Montescail using closer to 20W. Temperatures also vary, being between 60C-70C most of the time. You can expect around 2.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 2 hours from a Steam Deck LCD model.

Accessibility:

There are subtitles and the option to increase/decrease their size, along with the game's cursor size.

Conclusion:

I can't recommend Dragonkin: The Banished in its current state. The game world feels empty, and it seems too easy to become overpowered early on. Just as the story starts going anywhere, it ends, and you're expected to do "end-game" content. The roadmap the developers have put out doesn't even mention if they're expanding the story, which worries me. For now, I would stick to the safer alternatives like Diablo IV or Path of Exile 2.

Performance on the Steam Deck is ok, but you will occasionally see dips below 30 FPS. It's playable, but not the best way to play the game.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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