Dragon Takers Review - More Like Drag-on
I feel like every time I start reviews nowadays, I’m talking about horror. Just stick with me for a moment. There’s a bell curve of enjoyment with bad horror. Some movies are so bad they’re good; some are just plain awesome. In the middle though, that’s the death zone. Where stuff isn’t too bad but also not good enough to find enjoyable. Do you see where I’m coming from?
Dragon Takers falls into the death zone. I’ve played some stinkers, and they’re super fun to review. Games in the middle are tough; you don’t want to smack them down too hard because there are redeemable qualities, just not…tonnes.

I really enjoy the hook here though. Helio is a person born without a skill, in a society where skills are the most important thing. It’s never really explained why or how, but yes, people have skills and he gets bullied because of him. Weirdly, everyone thinks he’s super useless and looks down on him. No idea why other than being different. Maybe that’s reflective of the world we live in. When the Dragon Army comes to his village and burns it down. Helio is almost killed but is worried about the safety of his childhood friend, so instead fights back. In a twist no one could have seen coming, it’s not that he doesn’t have a skill, it’s that it’s the most powerful one; Skill Taker. This allows him to learn the skills from enemies. Using his newfound skill, he saves the day and starts his quest to take down the Drake Emperor.
There are 100 skills to learn in the game, but the issue with this is myriad. Firstly, the difference between “breath” and “magic” is minimal, outside of it hitting an enemy’s weakness or not. Secondly, most of them boil down to the following: does more damage, hits multiple, hits all, hits one, or is a different element. Everyone else in your party generally learns all the useful skills you want anyway, so I ended up just putting on a few that covered elemental weaknesses and upped them to the next potency when I came across them. It’s a lot less interesting than expected and ends up being a bit ho-hum.


Learning the skills brings another issue. I don’t have any issue with a chance to learn a skill on attack, that’s fine. There’s no bestiary though, so any chance you have of finding a missing skill outside of trial and error is minimal. Each area only has a few enemy types in it, but you can still miss an enemy and completely lack the skill. They are divvied out at a decent pace though, so that’s nice.
The story is mostly very predictable, but toward the end, there are a few surprises. I’m a sucker for world-building though, and it’s just not here. Outside of the main story, there’s legitimately no reason to talk to anyone else in the world. Merchants don’t exist, there’s no side quests, nothing. Every person can be ignored if they don’t progress the quest. All their dialogue is very bland too, but I don’t think this is on the translators. The translation seems good and is more an issue with the parent material.

Even dungeons are pretty basic. Most of the corridors are linear, and whilst there is some chests sprinkled around, it’s not too many. Interestingly, it creates a new problem that can require grinding to get out of. Because there are no merchants, the only gear upgrades you’ll get come from grinding mobs or finding chests. It’s interesting, and it also encourages you to learn more skills. But as with all things, grinding mobs finds a new problem; the auto-battle system.
The auto-battle system in this game makes me legitimately mad. It’ll use your ‘strongest’ attacks, regardless if the enemy is weak to it or not. Strong against fire? If fire’s your strongest attack, it’s sure as hell going to spam that. Only one mob? You better hope a group attack isn’t your strongest, or you’ll chew through your MP like it’s a bag of chips. Incredibly frustrating. Forget about buffs and healing too, auto just straight-up ignores them.


I make it all sound dreary, but here’s the good point. The game looks pretty good. The character/monster art is detailed, the music is quite good. The story has some good beats. The game’s not even super long; it took me around 12 hours to finish it, except for one skill I missed which I sure as hell am not going back to find.
In the end, Dragon Takers is fine. I didn’t hate it, but it also didn’t excite me. There are worse ways to spend your time, but there are also a lot better ways too. Welcome to the death zone. It’s ok here.

Dragon Takers was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.