Dragonheir: Silent Gods Impressions: The next big mobile RPG? Preview

It has become quite common to see RPGs being designed for both PC and mobile systems. The genre can be suited to both a mouse and keyboard and also touchscreen controls, and most notably in the past, this has led to the creation and launch of Diablo Immortal, a game I still think is one of the better mobile titles on the market, even if it does have its monetised demons. But the reason I bring up Blizzard's title is because it felt very similar to SGRA Studio's project Dragonheir: Silent Gods, a title that I had the opportunity to test for around 20 minutes while at Gamescom this year.

The demo I got to experience started a short way through the narrative, meaning it was very difficult to get heads or tails of what was going on. Fantasy jargon and terms were thrown around consistently, meaning it wasn't the easiest title to get to grasp with in a story sense. But the gameplay on the other hand felt rather intuitive, and after a few moments with plenty of trial and error, it felt like second nature to explore the world and to tackle the combat.

The exploration throughout the open world sees players guiding a group of characters from an isometric perspective over a map that feels small in comparison to the characters' scale. Think Civilization and how the character models look enlarged in scale to ensure that travelling doesn't take an eternity across the big world map. In the world, you can loot chests for gold and other helpful items to upgrade your characters, and can meet other individuals to accept additional quests and engage in the branching dialogue narrative system, and even come into contact with enemies, leading to a combat encounter kicking off.

As I got to experience the mobile version of Dragonheir, the combat was played in such a way where you start by placing your team on a grid in a way that best protects the weaker characters and sets the stronger ones up to soak up the damage. Once the placement procedure is complete, you start the battle and from here your only input is to activate each character's ability when it has completed charging. For offensive characters, this could be a high-damage attack on one foe, or an area attack instead, and for supportive characters, you could instead activate a healing puddle or raise the defence of your team. The main catch with the abilities is that when you activate one, a 20-sided dice is rolled, and the side it lands on determines the strength of the ability (with 20 being the maximum and 1 being a critical failure).

There are clear Dungeons & Dragons influences in this game, and for what it's worth, Dragonheir also dances with the complexity of that tabletop title. On one hand, the core premises of the game are very easy to understand, but on the other hand, there are a lot of additional RPG elements and customisation offerings that significantly up the challenge of being able to quickly understand this title. And all of this is on top of the monetised offering, which from what I could see includes ways to spend premium currencies to unlock new characters that you can add to your team.

So, while Dragonheir's scale and intricacies was something that surprised me, as is the case with a lot of games that are also debuting on the mobile platform I do think it's worth waiting to see the extent of the monetisation offering before making a firm judgement about this game. Sure, the battles are exciting, the set pieces thrilling, the world packed with content, and the graphics rather good for a mobile game - there really is a lot to be excited about. But, if the game is also defined by how much money you pump into it, then it is a different story, so for the time being, I'll remain cautiously optimistic about Dragonheir: Silent Gods.

We've been hands-on with SGRA Studio's RPG as part of our time in Germany for Gamescom 2023.

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