![\"Rise](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/dragon_apartment.png\")
<\/a>If your game has a timer built into it, there\u2019s a good chance I probably won\u2019t bother with playing it. Timers are basically the worst sort of artificial tension a video game can possibly have. Want to stress the player out? Put a timer into your game. Want to make sure that they never know if they\u2019re moving along the \u201cbest path\u201d of the game? And while they\u2019re going, you cut off paths so that their \u201cdecisions matter\u201d by way of a time stream? By all means, add a timer to your game.<\/p>\n
Timers are especially frustrating in adventure games, where the idea of the design is to move through a game slowly; finding and solving the puzzles you come across by using your wits.<\/p>\n
But Rise of the Dragon wants to be different, so it establishes real early on that there\u2019s only 72 hours in which to solve the mystery. Then, to add silly wonkiness on top of the timer, it adds events that you can totally miss if you\u2019re not living or dying by the clock.<\/p>\n
This is all sort of too bad, too, because the world of Rise of the Dragon is interesting. It\u2019s not very<\/em> fleshed out, but there\u2019s enough of a skeleton there that you can see the potential of \u2013 what must have seemed at the time \u2013 a sure fire series.<\/p>\n So, the set up is that it\u2019s the future. It\u2019s a kind of Blade Runner vision of the future, with everything being dark, foreboding and somewhat gritty. None of the buildings are truly clean, nor are they new. Everything Blade owns seems somehow worse for wear, from his small, dingy apartment to his rattan clothing.<\/p>\n This is a future that was designed pre-internet, but you can see some<\/em> of the stirrings of an internet-like setup in there. Blade interacts with his girlfriend, who has access to a database. The database is assumed to be online. Some personal travel happens by helicopter [but you\u2019re too poor to part-take of that] and there seem to be robot troopers that show up on some interstitial screens. So, it\u2019s not an especially bright and cheery tomorrow.<\/p>\n In this future, Blade is a Private Detective. Once, he was a cop, but some disgrace befell him [the game\u2019s never clear on what happened, exactly] \u2013 now, he solves mysteries for other people in order to make ends meet.<\/p>\n When the game starts up, one such mystery shows up on his doorstep: The mayor loses his daughter to some particularly odd drug and it\u2019s up to Blade to discover who\u2019s behind the killing. It doesn\u2019t take especially long for things to get deeper and scarier than that though, but you were expecting that, right? What with the title of the game being \u201cRise of the Dragon\u201d and all.<\/p>\n The visuals, sound design and general feel of the game are very<\/em> evocative of Blade Runner, and this is all good, because the tone comes across magnificently, but the game underneath this particular shell is \u2013 for adventure gamers, anyhow \u2013 sort of thin on the ground.<\/p>\n There are a handful of puzzles to solve, but they\u2019re not particularly difficult, nor will they take you long to figure out, instead, the game directs itself in another way: you need to make the story move along through conversation. These little chats with NPC\u2019s form the backbone for the adventure, fleshing out what\u2019s at stake for the characters involved and the world of Rise of the Dragon at large.<\/p>\n So these become the \u201ccore puzzles\u201d of the game. Doing something wrong here usually sets up some kind of bad situation. At best, you now need to find another way to do a specific task and at worst, you\u2019re suddenly in an unwinnable situation.<\/p>\n For most modern gamers, the closest equivalent is probably TellTale\u2019s The Walking Dead, with its particular emphasis on character interaction. This isn\u2019t even a bad device, particularly because the game is rooted in the film noir school of detective story. By Act Three, there\u2019s a damsel in distress, a genuinely terrible threat on the loose and a city to save.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>