Team Dragon Review: Great looking tech demo, but that’s about it

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Published on Thursday, 24 January 2013 09:36

Tegra-exclusive games are pretty common in the realm of Android gaming, but Qualcomm-exclusive ones are pretty rare and generally generate less fanfare. Anyway, a few days back Team Dragon, a side-scrolling fighting game in the same vein as Street Fighter X Tekken made its way to Google Play, just for Qualcomm devices. It does look really good, but is there any flesh to it? Read on to find out.

Name: Team Dragon | Publisher: Khaeon | Category: Arcade | Players: 1+ | Version: 1.0.0 | Size: 48 MB | Price: Free (Demo) | $3.99

So, in Team Dragon you are basically pitted against an opponent in a one-on-one fight. You have a d-pad on the left to move and 4 buttons on the right. You can punch, kick, block and grapple your opponent. Whoever wins 2 rounds is declared the winner.

The Google Play description seems to suggest a story (something along the lines of fighting for justice in cities against thugs and the likes of it), but this game is totally devoid of one. In any case, there is a career mode, but all you basically do is go up against a bunch of fighters that have the same characteristics but dressed in different skins. I beat this mode in like 20 minutes. Yeah, that’s short. Really short.

Aside from that there is a regular versus mode where you can jump right in to the action, or a tournament mode. Nothing special about these either because once you’ve played the career mode you’ve basically seen all that the game has to offer.

There is local multiplayer (WiFi & Bluetooth) support as well, but sadly I wasn’t able to test it out as it kept on crashing when I clicked on either choice. Multiplayer may liven things up for a while, but trust me you’d get bored soon enough as the gameplay is really limited.

The only real redemption of Team Dragon is its impressive graphics, which it manages to cram in a download size of under 50MB. The character art looks good, and the surroundings are animated with elements such as swaying palm trees, smoke and a factory production line at work.

Also, as you land a punch on your opponents face, you can see sweat flying off. Grappling your opponent and slamming him or her into the railings will result in visible damage to the railing as well. In short, on the graphics side of things, Team Dragon is up there amongst the best.

Team Dragon falls short on many other aspects aspects. The controls which are made up of virtual buttons are just too small. On many occasions, I will be tapping the screen to land a punch, but nothing happens as my thumb misses the small hitbox.

The fights are pretty bland and boring, and as mentioned above all opponents exhibit the same behavior. The CPU AI is also pretty poor – playing the game on hard mode isn’t as big as a challenge I’d have liked. And well, this may not exactly be a shortcoming, but the game is filled with enough Qualcomm logos that you wonder they might as well have released it for free to all Android devices.

Conclusion:

As good as it may look, Team Dragon epitomizes the term “tech demo”. There is absolutely no content whatsoever here. Multiplayer support should be the only reason you even consider getting this, but then again it doesn’t seem to be functional at this point in time. This is a shame because Team Dragon seems to be running on a really good engine, and has a potential to achieve so much more. By today’s standards, the game is definitely not worth your $3.99.

Overall rating: 2/5

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