Screenshot: Century: Age of Ashes
Who the hell doesn’t want to ride a dragon in a fantasy setting? Every game I’ve seen with dragon riding, from
Panzeer Dragoon to
World of Warcraft, has solidified the fact that riding flying fire-breathing lizards is damn cool. When
Century: Age of Ashes was announced, I thought it was the perfect idea for an arena multiplayer game: two teams of three dragons face off in score-based aerial dragon fights. Awesome, right? Not quite.
Century: Age of Ashes is a third person action arena shooter. In it, you play as a dragon rider facing off against other dragon riders in an effort to burn them down before they can burn you. You can avoid them by swooping low, and generating stamina which you can burn off in fast bursts to evade and get around your opponents to unleash your own volley of fire balls and deadly fire breath. It’s arena combat on dragons, and it’s absolutely great to look at.
Century: Age of Ashes has AAA visuals with both dragons and riders looking absolutely spectacular. You can even customize the look of your rider and dragon down to the saddle. It’s too bad it just isn’t that fun to play.
Screenshot: Century: Age of Ashes
While
Century: Age of Ashes is a great concept that looks great, it’s just not very fun. It might take an hour or two before you realize that
Century: Age of Ashes’ gameplay is underwhelming, but it’ll happen sooner than you’d think. As much as I’d like to report that soaring on a firebreathing dragon is done well in
Century: Age of Ashes, it’s just not: movement is light, and floaty. Dragons don’t collide into anything—not the ground, or each other—instead, just being pushed away and maybe losing some speed. These aerial encounters don’t feel like dogfights (or dragon fights) at all.
The arenas themselves help a bit with the dull gameplay. Columns of air can shoot you high up instantly, while gliding along the ground helps refill your stamina—both ways to get the action higher and lower naturally, which is clever. But most attacks and abilities can lock on, or spray indiscriminately, making these altitude differences only good for temporary befuddlement, or evasion. There are also multiple different game modes you can play, though they do little to change up the overall pacing of the gameplay. There is the normal team deathmatch mode, but also a sort of capture the flag mode called Gates of Fire that has you carry a flag through a series of gates to score points. There is also a Spoils of War mode which sees you attacking golden dragon riders to steal their cargo.
Screenshot: Century: Age of Ashes
While the gameplay is a bit bland, I also suffered some technical issues during my time with
Century: Age of Ashes. As far as I can tell, while there are dedicated servers for things like the store, the matchmaking in
Century: Age of Ashes is peer-to-peer. You can correct me if I’m wrong in the comments, but if that’s true, then it could be the reason why I’ve experienced such a rollercoaster of connections—from flawless, to rubber banding messes, the latter of which is unacceptable in an arena combat game.
One of my favorite concepts in
Century: Age of Ashes is the ability to hatch dragons from eggs, and raise them into adults. Each step of the process is completed by finishing a challenge/quest in the arena. I really like the concept of this, because it’s not just time-based, but challenge-based. It’s true that some of the challenges can take a frustrating amount of time, however—but with so much monetization thrown into
Century: Age of Ashes, I was afraid dragon egg incubation would be a activity the developers would try to get you to throw money at, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Screenshot: Century: Age of Ashes
While
Century: Age of Ashes is technically free to play, there are three premium packs you can lay down your hard earned money for. Each of these packs contains exclusive skins, icons, titles, XP boosters, with the higher packs including legendary dragons to ride into battle.
Century: Age of Ashes is a beautiful game that looks exhilarating to play, but the truth is that it’s a bit boring. Flying and combat feel loose, and are mechanically boring. I was hoping
Century: Age of Ashes would be the dragon riding game I was always dreaming of, but it just hasn’t grabbed me. Perhaps future updates, and even the introduction of new classes will change things up enough to give me an excuse to jump back in—but for now, my dragon riding dreams will just be dreams.
Century: Age of Ashes is
available now and free to play.
A Steam key for the premium Behemoth Pack was provided to us for this review.
