Remember DragonStrike? It had a great feeling of flying through the air on your trusty dragon steed attacking enemies with a variety of abilities. No? Ok, maybe that was too long ago. How about Drakan? While the platforming portions of both games in the series were largely forgettable, flying your dragon was the best. Don’t remember that one either; jeez, how old are you? Let’s try Lair. It was an amazing looking dragon flight game that… Ok, so it looked good, that’s about it.
As you can see there aren’t a whole lot of great games that let you fly dragons, which is peculiar given most the deep fantasy roots many game developers have.
Well, things may be changing now that we have Dragons of Elanthia from Simutronics. Dragons is a free to play multiplayer aerial combat simulator that puts you in control of a dragon rider as he attempts to rid the skies of all enemies. Each dragon and rider has a unique set of 3 abilities, which you can mix and match to find a combination that works for you. So if you want to have a goody two shoes Paladin on the back of a Bone Drake, do it! Although you may one or two other players in the game mock you for mixing themes inappropriately.
Dragons of Elanthia looks pretty far along already for having been in development for less than a year. In fact, it was shown at PAX this past summer and received a very positive reaction from gamers as well as the press. The Kickstarter campaign is an attempt to raise the money needed to have a sufficient back-end for a large free to play game. The deadline to raise the $200,000 needed to make this happens is November 27th.
