The I of the Dragon

I've always had a soft spot for games that hand you the keys to something genuinely powerful rather than asking you to play the usual sword-swinging protagonist. Pick your dragon from three archetypes: Annoth the fire-breathing bruiser who barely touches his spellbook, Barroth the fragile spell-spammer who freezes enemies and regenerates mana fast, or Morrogh the slow-moving black necromancer who poisons the ground and raises the dead to fight for you. On paper, that is a real and interesting build choice. In practice, the gap between promise and delivery defines the entire experience. The core loop runs like this: fly over one of 12 large geographical regions, destroy monster lairs before they spawn more enemies, build a human town on cleared ground, upgrade that town to raise walls and soldiers, then repeat in the next zone until you reach the demon lord Skarborr. The spell system is the game's single best feature, with over 60 abilities to slot across up to 12 hotbar positions accessed via F1 through F12. You can call geysers, drop volcanoes under enemy feet, summon zombie allies, launch lightning, or blind groups of monsters to safely level their lair. Managing which spells fill your limited slots between missions, and how you spend level-up points across fire power, fly speed, health, and mana inflow, is genuinely engaging for the first few hours. Collecting colored crystal orbs from destroyed lairs to unlock bonus spell slots or boost your dragon's specialty stat adds a light but real progression layer on top. The problems surface fast and compound over time. Movement is sluggish enough that the game includes a speed slider going up to 200 percent, which most players will want running at all times. Morrogh in particular handles like a freight barge. The camera is clunky, key remapping is limited, and the handful of missions where you leave your dragon to control a human warlord or a hunter on foot are widely considered the game's worst segments, with the controls dropping noticeably in quality the moment you are not a flying reptile. Voice acting and subtitle text rarely match. Cutscenes are rough. The story itself, a prophecy about dragons saving humanity from the reborn demon Skarborr, never develops its characters enough for you to care about the outcome. What keeps the Steam community at a "Mostly Positive" rating is something harder to dismiss than any technical critique: the core fantasy works on a primal level. You are an actual dragon, not a rider, not a humanoid shapeshifter. You eat monsters by picking them up mid-flight. You terraform mountain ranges with volcanic spells. Levelling up stays rewarding at a consistent pace throughout the campaign rather than front-loading gains and tapering off. A small but dedicated modding scene on ModDB has produced rebalance mods, expanded spell packs, and even improved visual effects, which meaningfully extends the ceiling for players willing to hunt them down before starting a playthrough. As an RPG with meaningful narrative choices, branching writing, or character arcs worth dissecting, this is simply not that game. There is no Disco Elysium-style payoff waiting behind the repetitive quest loop. What The I of the Dragon offers is a niche, clunky, occasionally thrilling action RPG from 2004 that scratches a very specific itch. If you have wanted to play as a necromancer dragon who can raise a small army of corpses while poisoning an entire valley, and you are comfortable adjusting your expectations for a product of its era, there is something real here. Everyone else will bounce off the sluggish controls inside an hour.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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