No introduction needed ... this game is absolutely awful!
What little plot does exist is very 'run of the mill' sci-fi stuff. Unsurprisingly, there is only one hope for mankind. ("You must pilot the raven ...") Nothing even the slightest bit unique here. No surprise really.
There are not many missions included in this game, and what are included all feel the same. Very little in the way of variety. Not nearly enough weapons or enemies. With the exception of the change in background color, you might think that all the missions took place on the same planet! Very dull.
Surprisingly, I thought the music was decent. Certainly not the "killer cd audio track" that the package boasts, but solid nonetheless. The sound effects are nothing to write home about though.
Despite the claims made ("Awesome 3D graphics in millions of colors!", "Cinematic film-quality animation sequences") I found the graphics in this game to be bland and fairly weak. I will cut it a little slack as it was a very early 3DO release, but just a little. Total Eclipse was also released around the same time, and it 'totally eclipses' Draxon in the graphics department. (I apologize for the awful pun, but this game is so poor I needed to lighten the review up with some lame attempt at humor
)
The only thing that did live up to the developer's promise was the "Light source shaded, texture-mapped polygons" While very dated looking today, at the time they looked quite solid, and offered a glimpse into the potential of the 3DO. The Briefing mode, which allows you to view and zoom in on the enemy vehicles is actually rather polished. Accompanied by music and an audio description, it gives the game much more hope than it should have.
At it's best, the most this game could have hoped for was to be a mild distraction until the second wave of 3DO titles hit the market. It could not even do that. It fails in most all aspects (including the most important one, fun.) But easily the biggest failure of this game is the challenge. You are given only 1 life, with no continues, and no save feature. Your life bar is not very large, and worse, it does not reset between missions! (fuel bays can replenish you, although I only counted two during the whole game) Not only was this decision beyond stupid on the part of the developers, but it was just plain lazy! A game should be challenging because of cleverly laid out levels and smart artificial intelligence. The levels in Draxon all look alike, and while the computer might be cheap, it is not very bright (bosses can be destroyed in just a few seconds) The ridiculous challenge that the developers tacked on only serves as a bandaid, attempting to cover these other failngs in hopes that they will be overlooked. When the development team openly admits in the manual that you will need a "...large measure of just plain luck" to progress through the game, you know that they have failed in their jobs.
Just to drive home this failure a bit more, I used a code to allow myself to finish the game. From start to finish it took 15 minutes! (half of which was spent struggling to shoot down flying enemies that were difficult to hit) Fifteen minutes ... absolutely pathetic! (and the 5 second ending...my goodness how lazy could the developers get?) This is obviously why they made it so difficult to progress ... so that players wouldn't discover just how little of a game this really is. When I think that some early 3DO adopters actually paid $50 or more for this title when it was first released...
Dynamix should have been ashamed for putting such garbage on the market!The only reason to maybe own this title is if you are a serious 3DO collector (and even then it is a big maybe) With crap like this early on, it is no wonder that 3DO stuggled to be taken seriously. One of the worst games for the 3DO, or any platform for that matter.
-Trev
