Combat Of Giants: Dragons (Bronze Edition) (Hands-On) (Nintendo DS) Preview

Ignoring the possible taboo subject of mass human slaughter, Combat of Giants: Dragons (Bronze Edition) is a DSiWare entry into the Ubisoft series that previously allowed gamers to take charge of dinosaurs. Whether dragons are a step up over dinosaurs or not is debatable, but you have to ask yourself - which one is it that can breathe fire and fly again? The game's entirely touch screen controlled, with Animal Crossing-style movement, and is split into two distinct gameplay elements: exploration and combat.

Exploration has you stomping around the world, your screen shaking with every step, looking for gems to help unite the kingdoms and solving simple objectives such as 'stomp on big stone'. Naturally, being a dragon, your wings come into play; a double tap anywhere on the screen allows you to take to the air and soar over the land, which is both faster and more satisfying than walking. Of course, you can only go up there when there's not something to obstruct your flight, and to land with a nasty stomp you need only double tap where you want to go to activate an impressive descent. Both in air and on ground you can roar out fire by rubbing on the screen to build up the outburst and then tap in any direction to direct the assault. The flames are needed to torch trees that are obstructing you, or just for fun even if they're not. You usually get some gems out of it, either way.

As you investigate your surroundings you will come across rival dragons; touch them either physically or with fire breath and you enter the combat mode. Each dragon is placed on separate 'boards' opposite each other and moved to different positions around it with the stylus. Where you stand dictates what attack you can use at a particular time, so if you stay in one place you will use claws, others tail, others head, etc.. You can also still double tap to fly and open further attacks. To block against an attack you swipe backwards towards your dragon, but to go on the offensive you slash towards the enemy.

You are then asked to select the level of power for your attack - how powerful it can be depends upon how many gems you have accumulated - and carry out your strike by joining dots that appear on the screen. Connect at least two and your attack will be effective, but the more you manage the higher the damage will be. When enemies strike at you the process is similar, only you must scribble out the lines that they draw between dots to try to lessen their damage. The less line they have remaining on the screen, the better you're going to come out of it. In the multiplayer mode this is going to lead to people drawing ever more elaborate lines to hurt opponents as much as possible, but you only have a limited amount of 'ink' to use each round - so be careful.