Dragonshard, a real time strategy game from Ubisoft and developer Liquid Entertainment, is a mix of both the old and new schools of RTS design. There are a lot of innovative ideas in the game, from the way you build your home city to the dungeon crawl underground setting where your heroes plunder the depths for treasure. As solid as the design is in parts, it's the old school design elements (or lack thereof) that drag it down a bit.

Dragonshard is heralded as the first ever D&D real time strategy game. While this technically isn't true (Blood and Magic was released by Interplay back in 1996 with the license in full effect) the D&D flavor that permeates throughout the game works extremely well. While Dragonshard is a D&D game only by name, and not through any real use of the D&D RPG rules, you will see many of the creatures from the classic RPG's bestiary from Beholders to Medusas. The game is set in the world of Eberron, which is a really cool choice rather than the standard D&D setting of the Forgotten Realms. The world of Eberron itself plays a role in the game's design. One of the primary resources is dragonshards, which periodically fall from the sky in (semi) random locations. The other resource is gold, which can be found in the underground dungeon areas by finding treasure chests or by killing monsters. Killing enemies (above and below ground) also earns you a lump sum of experience, which can also be spent to build new structures back at your home base.

Another D&D trait is that units may advance in levels, gaining more hit points as well as new skills, and even some generic followers that help them in combat. (A level two Cleric, for example gets a free Initiate sidekick that always travels alongside the Cleric.) Units go up in level by building additional buildings inside your home city. In fact, the build system is one of the better innovations in the entire game. You don't build cities when are where you want with some sort of generic settler unit. Instead you build them in predetermined areas. You have a large keep in the middle, surrounded by empty squares upon which you can build a specific number of other structures. With limited build space you are forced to make some very tough choices during the course of a game. Do you build an extra Barbarian building so advance your units to a higher level or do you build a structure that adds to their health or combat ability? This is a really cool feature as it ensures that no two home bases (and thus no two armies) will be identical or overloaded with innumerable structures. You are forced to make some sacrifices.

Aside from battling it out above ground Dragonshard also allows you to do some classic D&D dungeon crawling (complete with traps). There are designated areas on the map that allow your troops to head below ground. The dungeon areas are used as passage ways as well as areas to find artifacts and gather gold.

If all of this sounds like a lot to juggle – it is. The game plays at a breakneck pace and there is no option to slow it down. You also cannot pause and issue orders, so once the game starts, you're off to the races and may the best player (the one who is the fastest with the hotkeys) win. The lack of a pause and issue order feature is a bit frustrating but the fact that there isn't a basic game speed setting is just bizarre. Dragonshard demands your constant attention. If you're the kind of real-time strategy gamer that doesn't mind this frantic pace, then Dragonshard is easy to recommended, but RTS fans that like a bit of a slower pace to their games are going to get overwhelmed by all of the 'stuff' in the mix.

For example, there's no way to set units into a basic formation, so the battles end up more like large masses of units thrown at one another rather than anything too tactical. In addition, each unit has special skills, some of which need to be manually activated, which is a huge pain to use in the thick of a large fight (and where the pause button would be greatly appreciated). Also, units have a very cool resistance meter so that it's easy to see what types of damage each unit is most susceptible to, but things move so darn fast that you rarely get a chance to use this effectively.

Battling it out below ground isn't too hectic during the campaign because of how the missions are structured but it's downright crazy during skirmish games against the AI. It's like trying to juggle while reading a book. There's simply too much going on. Multiplayer games are also both hit and miss. Getting a game to work with more than two people remains an exercise in frustration. Multiplayer games also have a tendency to lock up, which is enough to almost shelve this portion of the game entirely. That said, you can play a LAN game with just one CD, which is actually by far the best way to play multiplayer-Dragonshard.

Dragonshard has so much going for it: great graphics, good sound, an entertaining and functional setting, innovative elements like the home base structuring and the familiarity of the D&D license. But with partially broken multiplayer, and a game speed that only the most hardened real time strategy fan will be able to digest, it's a game that is a few significant design tweaks away from a blanket recommendation. - William Abner