Ready for me to make comparisons to games I played as a kid? Of course you are! Well, let me take you to a journey back to the mid-to-late 1990’s. We thought we had reached as far as we could with the world of video games. Years earlier, Super Mario World let us ride a dinosaur around. How could you beat that? Well, as soon as my brother got an N64 with Super Mario 64, we knew things would never be the same. No longer were games confined to the second dimensions. Mario could run forward, diagonally, side to side. It was bliss. Will kids these days feel that same rush when they fire up Dragon Land for Android devices? Wow, I felt really old saying that.

The Basics

Dragon Land is about dragons. Now that that surprise is out of the way, let’s get a bit deeper into it. You play as a dragon named Blaze and must save your world from….something. I think? I’m actually not entirely sure if this game has a story. Let’s just say that Blaze has to collect as many coins as possible to improve the local economy and help Dragon Land expand its resources. Yeah, that sounds pretty good.

The Gameplay

While I opened up talking about Super Mario 64, this game bares more resemblance to Spyro The Dragon. (For the record, both are 3d platforming games. Please don’t be mad.) Similar to Spyro, you glide around, breath fire, and battle a few enemies along the way. In fact, Blaze looks particularly similar to Spyro… I’d go deeper into that, but I’m just too tired.

Is It Good?

Dragon Land suprised me with its gameplay quite a bit. First off, the controls are very easy to use. After I got the hang of it, I was gliding, fire breathing, and getting to the final coin with ease. Additionally, there was a good amount of work put into his game. Sometimes it will switch around between 2D and 3D to break things up a little bit. My only real issue was how generic everything looked. Nothing seemed to have much personality to it. I say make Blaze more edgy! Give him a backwards hat, sunglasses and, I dunno, parachute pants.

The Bottom Line

Dragon Land is a great reminder of what makes a 3D platformer great. There’s a decent amount of challenge while remaining fun the entire time. If they’d only work a bit harder towards originality, I could see this becoming a better known mobile game series.