Indie Impressions - Fight the Dragon

Fight the Dragon

Now Available on Steam Early Access

from 3Sprockets 

  
With the help of a robust, user-friendly adventure map creation tool and an already very active and tight-nit community, Fight the Dragon is an incredibly addictive social interaction unlike anything I've seen on Early Access.. or Steam in general for that matter.

Even in it's earliest form it already has a massive set of tools collectively dubbed the Adventure Creation Kit (ACK) allowing anyone of virtually any skill level to create whatever is in their head from dark mines to open snowing forests, the variety here presented only in it's first week is enough to give every aspiring map creator the ability to conjure up something totally unique and special from one another. And this isn't taking into account the almost weekly updates the game will be receiving, already one in it's first week adding two entirely new sections of props to diversify your creations with. In short, map making is extremely addictive, often time consuming, and in the end extremely rewarding.

The fruit of my labor, after only an hour so much can be done with the ACK.

  
The gameplay itself is very fun and straightforward, almost arcade-y in a Gauntlet sort of way more-so than how modern grindy ARPGs of today play. There's already a great loot system in place that scales to your level (max 30 currently), with legendary and rare items to find that give you additional stat boosts and sometimes elemental attacks. The adventures themselves are all user-generated (outside of a small handful of high-quality maps created by the developer to show off what you can make), which is awesome for both the person exploring levels and the people creating maps, because everyone gets a fair chance at having what they made getting played. 

Exploring the graveyards of a user-created adventure, of which there are already over 1,000.

 
There's one other mode, a very cool concept which the game gets it's name from that has you pitted against a dragon in an arena with a ridiculous amount of health (in the millions). Killing the dragon in one, or even dozens of tries is impossible so you'll have to earn Dragon Tickets by completing Adventure maps created by the community in order to keep chipping away at it's health. There are currently no end-game rewards for the dragon that I know of (to be honest, it's so tough I don't think it's even been beaten by more than a few people yet) but it already has a leaderboard to rank you against other players based on damage done. I can't wait to see where this mode goes.

Fight that dragon!

These are only the basics really, the game has so much to do already and there's a lot more to come. If you're at all interested in creating worlds or playing other peoples' then check this out and come by the community hub, the community is very active and the developer is amazingly responsive to feedback and questions!