Open-world RPGs filled with as many side quests as beautiful vistas are hard to avoid in modern gaming. Inspired by the success of games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact, many have taken the plunge into these great green fields, seeking a niche of their own.

As a part of Steam Next Fest, I played the demo for DragonSword: Awakening, a new entry into the genre. With so many options to choose from, DragonSword: Awakening needed to do something special to set itself apart. Unfortunately, while being a perfectly functional game, I found the game lacking anything to make it stand out from the competition.

Dull Background

The game initially puts the player in the shoes of Lute, a fresh-faced boy who joins a group of mercenaries. In the demo, you complete a couple of fetch quest missions before being thrust into a full dungeon. The story didn’t especially hook me. Much like the rest of the game, it is entirely fit for purpose and entirely unoriginal.

DragonSword: Awakening takes place in a medieval fantasy world, a basic premise that has none of the twists that might be necessary to create excitement. It reminded me of the kind of world that one might see in a parody (think KonoSuba), such is its cookie-cutter nature. However, while a parody uses the basis of a familiar world in order to poke fun at its setting, DragonSword: Awakening plays it straight. This not only results in a story without an immediate hook, but hampers the open-world design by making exploration feel pointless. What is there left to find out about this world?

The large cast of characters whom you play as within the world (a good chunk of whom are playable in the demo, including one demo-exclusive character) feels like a holdover from DragonSword, the gacha game which Awakening is a reworking of. They each need to gain experience and levels, partly through combat but mostly through consuming items, as well as filling several armor slots each. Despite being daunting as a concept to someone who stays away from gacha games as much as possible, the demo wasn’t demanding of inventory management skills.

Enjoyable Gameplay

Combat is absolutely the game’s high point for me, though others might be familiar with the concepts from other places (a friend of mine mentioned Wuthering Waves). A basic combo can be performed with a string of attacks, and special moves are available with cooldowns. It’s standard hack-and-slash fare, helped by good variation between character movesets. Castella’s axe swings are much heavier than Lute’s sword swipes, for instance. Where it triumphs is the Signal Switch system, which allows characters to switch in with a special move when enemies meet certain conditions. It makes team-building a significant factor, pairing characters who inflict similar statuses. The switch itself is nice and emphatic, especially when multiple switches can be chained together.

Unfortunately, combat can also become grindy. The spectacle of a boss fight with a dragon kept it feeling interesting despite taking a while, but the same courtesy cannot be extended to a goblin. Despite being the same level, I found basic grunts taking full combos plus special moves to take down. It encourages the filling of the meters that bring Signal Switching into play, but prevents there from being quick encounters in the open world.

Getting from place to place is done by a mount, which was a cute little bug in my case. Gliding on it feels nice, though there were a few occasions when it was necessary across the demo’s broadly flat terrain. However, I loved wall-crawling with it in the city and up the couple of cliffs there were. Sprinting, both on bug and on foot, is tied to a gauge that feels unnecessarily restrictive and slow. Gliding consumes the same stamina, which again doesn’t seem to do anything but slow you down without fall damage as a penalty. It felt to me as though they had seen the mechanics of other games (Breath of the Wild springs to mind) and done the same without putting much thought into it.

Disappointing Presentation

Overall, I found the small touches to be lacking. This was a demo rather than a final release, but there are multiple examples of a lack of care that impacted the presentation. Seeing spaces consistently missing in the subtitles inspires little confidence. One character tells another to get off him, whilst that cutscene lacks the budget to even show them touching. Binding roll and sprint to the same button feels awkward when sprinting is always preceded by an unintended roll. It all brings a feeling of awkwardness to the game.

It came to a head with the demo’s climactic dungeon, in which I was forced to play as Lute rather than my chosen party for the sake of a puzzle and a chase scene. All of a sudden, all the characters present in cutscenes were there in gameplay too. Then, they disappeared again when combat restarted. I felt as though Awakening was trying to be a more traditional RPG for a second, only to be held back by its gacha roots.

All in all, this demo did not impress me. Despite the combat growing on me, it couldn’t stop me from thinking of the game as a less interesting version of what is already available. At the moment, it’s hard to think of anything that DragonSword: Awakening game does better than other games available now. In particular, Genshin Impact. DragonSword: Awakening is scheduled for release on July 22 on Steam and can be wishlisted now.