Well, Surreal Software has decided to make their bid for the imaginations (and wallets) of the dragon fans, with their title Drakan: Order of the Flame, which promises to bring the thrill of dragonflight to your PC screen along with a heaping portion of solid adventure. As expected, the game also features a tough-talking but beautful heroine of the Lara Croft bent sure to inspire web shrines en masse from lonely gamers who've spent just a little too long gazing at her polygonal backside.

The premise of the game places you in control of Rynn, as she seeks to save her little brother from marauding band of Wartoks. In order to accomplish this, she bonds with the last of an ancient dragon breed, a big ol' red bugger of a lizard named Arokh. To rescue her brother and prove herself worthy of the Order of the Flame, she must defeat the forces of an evil necromancer and save the land from an ancient peril.

Graphically, Drakan is a little awkward, polygonally-speaking, although it does have its moments. Technically, the biggest complaint can be registered against the engine itself - although it performs well when delivering vast spaces of open terrain, indoor scenes often grind down to unacceptably framey levels, especially when enemies are present. This occurred on both systems I tested the game on (Cel500 w/ V3 3K, P2-450 w/ TNT2 Ultra), even with texture detail turned down, shadows off, and the latest drivers installed. Adding insult to injury, the textures under the V3's 16-bit color (22-bit filter enabled) were horribly banded, an artifact I haven't seen since the days of my original Monster 3D. Obviously, this game was designed to run under 32-bit color, so Voodoo folk may want to be a bit wary. It looks to be more a problem with the way the lighting model is implemented, rather than an issue with the Voodoo hardware or 16-bit color modes in general. Occasionally, boundary errors occur, and Rynn can get stuck on a rock (especially while swimming) or will fall through a seam into the midnight ether outside the polygonal world, prompting a reload.

Aesthetically, the game is quite competent: the outdoor environments are gorgeous and brilliantly detailed, and some of the indoor mazes are very intricate and clever in both layout and texturing. Arokh, the dragon, is a great-looking model, especially with bump-mapping enabled. On the other hand, the model for Rynn is simply mutant - all breasts, with a misshapen torso and freakish extremities. Although she appears to have been designed with the male libido in mind, she's not at all attractive - the low poly count coupled with a bizarre model pretty much kills any potential she might have had as the next "virtual star." The monsters, on the other hand, look really good - the wartoks are hulking and ugly, and the succubi use a far better female-ish model than Rynn does, with actual hips and normal-looking appendages. And you'll definitely want 32-bit color to get the full aesthetic effect of the environments - level 5's beachside archipelago is a travesty of banded backgrounds without it. The same is true for many of the darker sub-dungeons - you'll see elegantly light-sourced textures instead of muddy pools of brown and black.

The special effects are pretty solid, and some of them, like the ice breath, look pretty slick and are satisfying to use. Enemies gib nicely when given a good whack, and delimbing your foe is an amusing diversion, visually. Almost all objects onscreen can and will burn when set alight, to little or no practical result. Evironmental effects such as storms, rain, sleet, and smoke add to the overall atmosphere, lending a strong sense of immersion.

Once again, the curse of middle-grade voice acting rears its head, looks us in the eye, and utters a chirpy, oddly-inflected cry. Rynn herself is passable (although her emotion sounds feigned), but much of the supporting cast is laughable fare straight from Saturday morning. Arokh's actor delivers his lines with laudable vigor, but the sampling method used often makes him incoherent. The ambient music, however, is quite good, with eminently listenable composition and an appropriately symphonic instrument choice.

The controls, when played using the mouse to look and the keyboard to move/strafe, work quite well. Any and all commands are easily remapped under the options screen - if you've played Heretic 2, you'll be able to set up this game and be kicking Wartok booty in no time. However, if you are a gamepad or joystick aficionado, things aren't so rosy. I attempted to play the game using a Gravis Gamepad and a Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro, both of which proved too touchy to adequately control Rynn (Arokh worked fine, though). When pushing forward, I often found that I couldn't stop Rynn's momentum quick enough to prevent her from falling off the edge, and jumping exercises such as those on Level 3 were abominably difficult using the Gamepad. If you want to play Drakan with utmost efficiency and minimal frustration, you'd better become familiar with the keyboard/mouse combo.

Drakan is quite ambitious, gameplay-wise: the levels are vast and intricate, and allow for both airborne navigation and detailed exploration on foot. The implementation of this design is quite remarkable, and done with incredible panache; there's nothing quite as cool as soaring over a vast demesne of hills and huts in a massive dragon, finding a point of interest, and then landing to explore it in detail and actually finding something worthwhile therein. For this play aspect, Surreal must be given due praise, and, with slightly different premise, could have made the game something more than it is. Unfortunately, the feeling of freedom is marred by constrictive linear progression - any feeling of casual exploration and discovery is eliminated by the necessity of obtaining a specific "key" or pulling a lever before an area is "unlocked." By doing this, the focus of the play is taken away from the freedom of dragonflight, and we become embroiled in yet another forcedly linear adventure game. The levels, despite their size, are quite linear (but not railed) - you must navigate through a clearly delimited area from point A to point B, blasting obstacles along the way. Occasional backtracking becomes needed to recover a key-type item or to push a button for further progression, only emphasizing the directed play. Again, if this were done in a more original fashion, it might be inspired, but, flight aside, we've done this all before in Tomb Raider and countless FPS titles.

Perhaps most harmful to the game is the derivative puzzle design and dull combat. The lever puzzle, it seems, is still back in fashion: pull lever A to open door B in area C, ad nauseum. The difficulty is upped in later levels by 3D platforming tasks - Rynn will frequently have to make jumps or rolls or be instantly killed. Again, this takes the focus away from exploration the vast environments could so effectively provide, and put the focus on frustrating platform action. I don't mind a bit of this - it's expected that jumping will have to occur in a mountainous environment - but Drakan's reliance on it to up the difficulty seems a bit contrived.

Combat had potential - serious potential - but it, like the rest of the game, is flawed. The enemy AI is very good, with your groundbased foes blocking, dodging, ducking, and using a variety of techniques. You have vast arsenal of weapons to find and utilize, ranging from greatswords to spells to bows, and then some. Sounds pretty rich, eh? Well, it WOULD be, if success in hand-to-hand combat wasn't dictated by your ability to circle-strafe effectively. Small wartoks and spiders aside, you WILL die if you cannot circle-strafe effectively. Stealth techniques are dubious; I've managed to sneak up on some creatures successfully and slay them, but loading and attempting the exact same technique from the same vector will result in them somehow "hearing" me. It's too unpredictable to be reliable, and, in 9 or so cases out of 10, a circle-strafing battle will result. I would rather have seen less-intelligent foes and more techniques for Rynn to execute, if the result of clever AI is endless rotating battles with so little in the way of excitement. Boss battles are the worst for this; if you have no arrows to put them down with, be prepared for a prolonged and dizzying exercise in spinning around your foes you attempt to avoid ranged attacks and strikes that can decimate Rynn's bar with a single hit. Much of the necessity for circle-strafing results from the sick amount of damage most foes deliver, even on the early levels; there's little reward for trying new tactics. C-strafing is so effective that it isn't funny, and with the limited number of health elixirs available, you'll find you rely on this tactic simply to survive. The "alternate fire" mode for many weapons is a block, but this, too, is ineffective; most enemies will strike you as soon as you drop your guard to block. To make swordplay interesting, to this reviewer at least, you have to have more techniques than a swing and a thrust. I don't expect Soul Calibur, but I do expect to have enough techniques to make battle visually interesting and to formulate effective tactics from.

The same is even more true for aerial combat - circle-strafing *is* the name of the game, against both single-player foes AND in multiplayer. Endlessly whirling, the circling aerial dance eventually bored me, since no tactics seemed as effective. Multiple breath weapon types help a bit, although the short-range secondary fire for the flame breath seemed singularly useless, since I could just c-strafe all my foes at range without taking a hit.

Despite my seeming negativity towards the game, there's really a lot to like and admire. The vast, gorgeous levels are a huge plus, and are awfully fun to simply explore. Rather than try to cram the game full of combat and jumping puzzles, I feel that the design would have been better served by making the game more open and less risk-filled, and by having more areas free of danger to use the dragon in. This, in some ways, was the promise that early previews hinted at, and the resultant emphasis on Tomb Raider-esque antics has left me a little disappointed. It is quite evident that they tried to spice up combat by giving the enemies a wide variety of behaviors, but without any interesting ones for Rynn, the effect is lost. The multiplayer mode is quite novel, but eventual degenerates into a lot of circling and shallow deathmatch action. A co-op mode for this game would've been truly outstanding.

In the end, Drakan comes across to this reviewer as a singularly ambitious game that didn't live up to the genre-busting potential its premise and engine could have provided. Exploration is wasted when linear scripting dictates the flow of play so heavily, and the puzzle-solving/ platforming is painfully generic. So much more could have been accomplished under this premise; I applaud what the designers were attempting to do, but I'm also sorry that they let the details of the game degenerate into cliches. If you are looking for Tomb Raider with a fantasy setting and a dragon to fly between locations with, I don't doubt that Drakan will satisfy your desires. However, if you were expecting more from the "dragonriding" aspect, as well as more of an open-ended RPG feel that such freedom implies, you'll probably be disappointed. Is it recommended? Only but barely - it's a great theme accompanied by some beautiful environmental visuals which collectively manage to make the stultifying combat and cliched platforming elements tolerable. But does that make it a good game? Sadly, no; Drakan: Order of the Flame is a playable game, but it never realizes its potential beyond, as many pundits so irreverently declared in previews, "Tomb Raider with a dragon."