Dragon Hunter

It’s a rather sad fact that the older you get, the less your expectations are confounded. You begin to spot patterns in everything - from people’s behaviour to the films and music that would once have entranced you.

Now and then, though, something springs up that takes you by surprise - a person will apologise for walking in front of you in the supermarket, or you’ll see a film that sends you in completely the wrong direction.

Dragon Hunter from Zed is that kind of game. While it falls short in a number of areas, it wins a great deal of brownie points for pulling the rug from under me.

My expectations of the game were based on the name, the typical fantasy title screen, and an intro that speaks of a “magical warrior… defeating all the armies of Devildom”. This was obviously going to be an RPG-lite hack ‘n’ slasher.

It isn’t, though. There are elements of character progression and plenty of up close and personal encounters with assorted mythical creatures, but at its heart Dragon Hunter is an old skool 2D shooter.

Playing a winged heroic type with the most un-heroic name of Eric, you must fly from left to right, blasting everything that moves. This being a mobile shooter, you fire automatically, but unlike in most mobile shooters you have direct control over a handy melee attack.

When you hammer the ‘Okay’/’5’ button, Eric lashes out with his bladed weapon of choice, with successive hits building up an increasingly destructive combo.

The need for such combos becomes apparent when you realise that your enemies rarely keel over after a shot or two. Each and every fiend has enough hit points to warrant being called a mid-level boss in most other shooters, with your vanilla attacks barely making a dent.

This is where the RPG elements come in, as you spend your hard earned spirit points (collected by finishing off baddies) on weapon and ability upgrades in between levels.

While this makes Dragon Hunter far more interesting than most other shooters, however, it also makes it something of a grind to get through. Thanks to the hardiness of the cannon fodder, as well as the chunkiness of your character in relation to the limited screen space, repeated death is almost inescapable.

The developer has allowed for infinite continues, but that only seems to acknowledge the game’s inherent unfairness.

This is the main problem with Dragon Hunter, over and above some dodgy translation work and poorly explained upgrade systems. However, it’s packed with just enough bright ideas that it might just make the game-of-the year shortlist for a sizeable niche audience.