Dragon Front
Review
Dragon Front is one of the first of its kind: a VR-exclusive CCG that puts you in that feeling of battling against your opponent/friend sat right across from you. Except instead of being forced inside your kitchen, hoping the cards won’t fall off the table the next time someone opens a door, you are instead transported to a bright and vibrant world, where your cards literally come alive when they are placed down onto the battlefield.
I’ll get this out of the way first and foremost, and that’s the game has no real story to speak of. While you could quite easily complain about such a problem, in a collectible card game the last thing you really need is a story, due to how lacking and easy to ignore that they tend to be. Instead of being a subpar addition to the game, the developers have left it out so you can have your complete focus on the gameplay and what’s important, rather than anything getting in the way of all that; something that I certainly appreciate.
Onto the main draw to the game, with that obviously being the CCG gameplay that we all know and love. Dragon Front isn’t exactly your typical card game, even though it does take some inspirations from the big card games, such as Magic and Hearthstone. It implements some extra levels of depth to make it different, intriguing, and challenging, as well as keeping the high-form factor of fun that this genre is known for. On each new game, you and your opponent start with a handful of cards, a 4 x 4 board that is split down the middle for each of you; with your front line of units taking the brunt of your opponent’s offensive and your backline taking the stance of support.
With Dragon Front your selection of cards range from spells to units, and they can be used both offensively and defensively - depending on your current situation and your chosen strategy that you’re working towards. To stop the game from being any mediocre CCG, it implements elements of chess (partly down to the board/battlefield) and gives you the ability to move your units around your side of the battlefield to give you that added level of strategy to bring you closer to victory and further from defeat.
From an aesthetic standpoint, Dragon Front is doing something a lot of card games don’t have the chance to do, and that’s to show you the cards in a 3D space and how they might react in the world. For instance, you can look down on your battlefield from the sky and see all the 3D details that your catapults, trebuchets, and soldiers have been implemented into and it gives the game this feeling of playing some really fun and interesting version of chess; without quite so easily forgettable rules.
One problem I’ve currently found with the game is some of the design choices, with the main one being that you can’t actually see any resemblance of your hands. Of all the VR games out there, a CCG is one where being able to see your hands moving about as you play does throw away some of that feeling of slamming down your card when you don’t have that particular addition.
Overall, Dragon Front is still in a pretty early stage in its life, but from the looks of things the game has a lot of potential and the VR nature of a card game is something many CCG fans will quickly fall in-love with. It does have some foibles here and there, but the interesting gameplay, strategy, and aesthetics more than make up for the game’s small amount of problems.
Guide
CCG’s are an interesting breed of genre, because despite putting hours into one of them, there’s only so much of that knowledge you can bring into a different game. You could have won several professional Hearthstone tournaments in your time, but if you jump into a new game for the first time there’s only going to be so much skill that gets transferred and while there’s no way to circumnavigate skill and practice; hopefully these tips will give you a decent idea on where to get started and how to improve your play.
To start off, one of the best tips in any game of this calibre has to be an adaptive strategy. Your opponent is almost always going to be playing a different combination of cards and strategy to take the win away from you. Once you start noticing patterns that your opponents are playing, make sure to play around them as best you can. For instance, if they are trying to rush you down as quickly as possible, switching your strategy to more control - grinding them down until their out of units or cards, only to come back with a hard-hitting swing is going to be considerably more effective than racing to see who might get the best draws first.
Secondly, learn from your mistakes. The best way to learn and improve is not to get angry and claim that last game was “all luck and no skill” and instead look at what you did that was good/bad. From there you can look at your future plays and realise where there might be a gap in your strategy or battle plan and lock it down before it starts to become a serious issue. Learning is easily the best way to improve your overall gameplay and going in with that specific mentality will help you throughout the entirety of the game.
Lastly, this one can be considered somewhat controversial in the CCG-scene, but it exists for a reason; not that everyone enjoys it: net-decking. If you’re not sure what net-decking is, it’s looking up online some of the best comprised decks during the current meta and copying them to take out online. While it does take away a lot of the fun of building and designing your deck from the ground-up, you will find many players doing it and keeping up with the current meta changes to those deck-archetypes will put you in an advantageous position.
With a genre like this, practice well and truly does make perfect, but CCG’s can be a tad difficult to get into at times, so hopefully these tips and tricks will help to put you on the road to your successful Dragon Front career. I look forward to seeing you on the battlefield!
