Drake of the 99 Dragons

The Good
The game's "comic book"-style presentation is a nice idea, but that's about it.

The Bad
Drake of the 99 Dragons was easily the worst game on the Xbox at the time, and is still one of the worst today. The fact that other games like World War II Combat: Road to Berlin have managed to do even worse than this is absolutely disgusting. From that previous sentence alone, you should get exactly an idea of how awful this game is. But I shouldn't consider myself surprised: The game's developers, Idol FX, have already gained an abysmal reputation from their budget-priced PC terrorist shooter FBI Hostage Rescue, which I also thought was one of the worst games to come out in a long time.

Do you seriously want an explanation of everything that's wrong with Drake of the 99 Dragons? How about this: Everything is wrong with the game. Okay, so do you really want an explanation? Yes? Here it is, you requested it. This might take all day...

The controls are absolutely atrocious. Due to some form of collision detection problems, the game will "auto-aim" at enemies that are in the other room. Yet, you can't shoot through the walls that they're behind. You can move the right aiming thumbstick to get the your aim off of the targeted enemy, but then this leads to another huge problem. The right thumbstick is also assigned to control the third-person camera, but your aim will not re-align with the camera. As such, you won't see where the heck you're aiming most of the time. Then this leads to another huge problem. The aforementioned aiming problems are extremely frustrating because enemies apparently don't have the same aiming problems that you do, given the fact that they're really good shots even when they're pretty far from you. After a few minutes of this unintuitive trial-and-error gameplay, I gave up.

Despite the fact that I like the "comic book" presentation of the game, the rest of the game looks abysmal in terms of graphics. It is obvious that the cartoonish look of the game is intentional, to make it look like a comic book. But that isn't the problem with the graphics: the problem is that everything in the game is detail-challenged and generally ugly, with a very low polygon count and a horrible framerate. The sound effects are even worse: almost all of the sounds are low-quality versions of those in other, better games, and the terribly glitchy sound engine only makes the already terrible sound effects even worse.

The Bottom Line
Overall, Idol FX has made a game that shows almost no effort whatsoever. The notoriously awful gameplay makes me think that there wasn't any kind of quality-assurance testing whatsoever with this game. It's just that awful. Whatever you do, stay away from this pile of crap at all costs, and don't say I didn't warn you!!!