Games worth discovering

Ads versus reality: Is Call of Dragons actually any good?

12K View2023-04-14

Have you ever scrolled through TikTok or maybe even watched a YouTube video, only to find yourself interrupted by an annoying ad you’ve seen countless times already? Well, I’m sick and tired of them, specifically the ads for Call of Dragons. Like, I get that it’s a new game from the creators of Rise of Kingdoms and it looks cool, but is it really as good as they say it is? To get to the bottom of this question, I downloaded Call of Dragons this week and played it so you don’t have to. And after playing for around three hours, I’ve finally come to a conclusion.

Call of Dragons is a fantasy MMO that features base-building and gacha rolling like Cookie Run: Kingdom. It’s similar to Clash of Clans in the respect of city-building, but it has a rich narrative and an almost RPG-like feel to it that sets it apart from other games.

There are a lot of great things in Call of Dragons that it does very well and a few others that miss the mark. To start off, one of the few things that I sorely enjoyed was base-building. Like Clash of Clans or Cookie Run: Kingdom, Call of Dragons required me to build a village of my own. From resource mining to troop training and even decorations, I could build and bling out my base however I wanted. And thanks to items that would speed up the building time, I didn’t even have to wait long.

I also really enjoyed exploring the world within Call of Dragons and strategically battling monsters and other creatures with the troops I had assembled. There was always danger right around the corner that I could vanquish, and even though I couldn’t battle neighboring villages since I had to upgrade the main town hall to level eight, I still had a blast.

Besides battling monsters, I also loved all the missions I could do to get resources. One thing that I really appreciated about Call of Dragons was its generosity. The game gave me a ton of resources, both needed in building structures and acquiring characters. Speaking of characters, Call of Dragons has a gacha rolling system where I needed to spend earnable/purchasable in-game currency to acquire heroes. This gacha system was actually quite generous too. I managed to pull three legendary heroes and five epic characters.

However, nothing really makes this experience more magical than Call of Dragons’s narrative and immersive storytelling. Before even building my base, I needed to choose one of three factions: orc, elven, or human. And based on that choice, the story would explore the current struggles of this faction. The elves were saving their forest from all the demons while the humans were trying to recapture their kingdom. Even if I wasn’t following the main story, I could interact with characters in my village and do side missions if I wanted to. This immersive experience made Call of Dragons so entertaining and worthwhile.

Onto the more negative aspects of Call of Dragons. The game looks visually cluttered and a little too vibrant and bright. It’s also hard to distinguish stuff on the map like neighboring towns, monster patrols, and small villages without zooming in a ton. The interface feels messy and it’s a little hard to navigate sometimes. And although the tutorial thoroughly taught me the ropes of the game, I hated that it took forty minutes for me to finally get the freedom to play how I wanted.

That said, these issues aren’t anything to cry over. Compared to everything else that Call of Dragons offers, like strategic battles, base-building, and exploration, the game’s actually pretty good. Although the ads are pretty annoying and really repetitive, the game does live up to the hype, and Call of Dragons is definitely worth playing.

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