The sound is fairly basic in comparison. There are several sound effects that aren’t all that interesting and there’s little music in the game. It’s certainly a budget title but the gameplay makes up for a lot of what it lacks in looks and sounds.
Most levels have some set goal that includes number of eggs (small or large) harvested or sold at market. Some levels have a time limit during which you must defend your nests while collecting, upgrading and selling at market. These levels get fairly intense in the clicking area and replaying them would certainly wear out your mouse finger for the day.
The game offers you four weapons and a wide variety of things to do. First you can combine small eggs to get large eggs. Then you can get a centrifuge which allows you to combine eggs and black crystals to make new crystals to sell. Then you can get an alchemy lab that will take three jewels of different colors and make a diamond. All while you’re defending your dragon egg farm, collecting eggs and shipping them to market. It does get quite challenging and hectic at times. You will also have to manage some dragon relations as well. On certain levels some dragons won’t like others. So you won’t want to group red with blue or green with red, etc as when they are extremely unhappy they will break their own eggs and then fly off leaving you with an empty nest and lost time.
The game pushes forward rather slowly in regards to giving you new things to work with. For example you are stuck with the first weapon, pistol, for quite some time and only later in the game do you start being able to choose the others. You have to put in some amount of time to start getting into the more varied missions. Once you gain the fortress you can start looking into accepting missions
that are more than just collecting eggs. But you’ll have to play through around 8 levels or so before you get to that point. In fact. some of the attack levels you won’t even be able to finish without getting the other weapons. So you’ll need to play through a lot of the original levels to get the weapons and succeed in the others.
Overall, the game is robust and offers a lot of gameplay. While the graphics and sound aren’t all that outstanding they’re not terrible and don’t really detract from the game. It’s certainly an interesting and innovative twist on the standard time management simulation genre.
Dragonester is available at GamersGate
