www.trialaction.com

Dragon Ball from TrialAction Games
Reviewed by: Eric Pankoke

One thing I like about the PDA game market is that unlike the PC and console markets, the developers are not shackled by the mantra “sell fast, sell many”. As a result we are often treated to unique, simple and fun games like Dragon Ball from Trial Action Games.

The premise behind Dragon Ball is rather straightforward. On each level there are several dragons trying to get from point A to point B along a track. Your objective is to destroy the dragons before they reach their destination. If a dragon reaches the end of the track you have to restart the level. Once you have used all of your lives the game is over.

So how do you get rid of those pesky dragons? Well, it seems that each dragon is made up of a series of sections, each section being one of several colors. Armed with your trusty “section shooter”, you must insert sections into the dragon’s body such that you create a string of at least 3 sections of the same color. Once you’ve done that, the connected sections will go away, and the remainder of the dragon will join back together. Once you’ve destroyed all of the sections in the dragon’s body, the head will disappear and that dragon is gone.

You control your shooter with the left and right directions on the D-Pad, and you can use either the stylus or the up direction on the D-Pad to fire. I prefer the D-Pad up direction, but unfortunately on my device it’s a bit sensitive, and quite often I find myself shooting on accident. Unfortunately, I can’t disable the use of the D-Pad for firing, so since the option is always there I choose to use it instead of the stylus. Optimally, it would have been nice to be able to configure the fire option to one of the hardware buttons.

From time to time sections of a dragon’s body will temporarily turn into a power-up. If you can destroy that section while it’s transformed, you will be awarded the corresponding power-up. Power-ups come in two different flavors. The first type of power-up affects every dragon on the screen. These power-ups include such things as slow-motion, stop, and reverse. The other type of power-up comes in the form of special sections that you can fire. These include a bomb that destroys everything around the vicinity of contact, a lightening bolt that destroys everything in its path, and a multicolored ball that takes on the color of the section it makes contact with.

In addition to the dragons themselves, the tracks are designed in such a way to provide their own challenges. Some of them have many twists and turns, so if your timing is off you might end up hitting the wrong section of a dragon as it rounds a bend. Other tracks cross over each other in sections, so a shot fired at a dragon passing under a section of track might inadvertently miss that dragon. There are even cases where the track has two exits, so you have to constantly watch both to make sure a dragon doesn’t get too close to either one of them.

So besides vanquishing the bad guys, what do you get for your time slaying dragons? Why, you get to rack up your score, of course! When you destroy sections of a dragon, you get points. When you destroy the entire dragon you also get points. In addition, you can score points with combos. Once you’ve destroyed a group of sections, if you can destroy another group with the next shot you have scored a combo. Each time you do this in succession the amount of the combo increases. On the flip side, the first time it takes you more than one shot to destroy a group of sections, the combo is over. The final way to score points is through a chain. Chains are formed when you destroy a group of sections, and the remaining sections that join back together have enough sections of the same color in a row to get destroyed themselves. A well placed shot could destroy 3 or more groups of sections in a dragon.

The game plays well, but is it easy on the eyes? You bet it is. All the “functional” screens (splash screen, menu, level map, etc.) are detailed and look very nice. The actual levels are a bit less detailed, but appealing none the less. Sections transforming into power-ups and back look good, and the effects when firing a bomb or lightening are pretty slick. Overall Dragon Ball presents a very professional visual appearance.

The audio is also first rate. While it appears that there is only a single track, the music matches quite well with the atmosphere. The sound effects all work together well, and the shattering of sections when destroyed gives quite an interesting impression of what the dragons might actually be. I quite enjoyed the audio element of the game.

Now we arrive at the “but…” section of the review. For the player in general, the biggest drawback to Dragon Ball will be the replay factor. There are a lot of levels to this game, but for all of the difficulties I’ve had with it, I’ve still managed to clear more than half of them already. If you aren’t into multi-pass games this might not be an issue, but I don’t think there’s much impetus to play the game once it has been completed. The next problem, and it’s possible that this is just specific to me, is that the game locks up a lot. I pretty much have to shut down the game after playing each level, and even then sometimes that’s not enough to keep the game from freezing the next time I launch it. And, since this is a full screen game, I’m pretty much forced to do a soft reset every time it freezes. I recently had to do a hard reset on my machine, and I’ve installed very little since then, so I don’t believe it’s an issue with any malicious software that’s running in the background. In fact, except for a couple of runtime files for different development environments and Total Commander, I don’t have anything else installed on my device yet. I’m using a Dell Axim X5 running WM2003. I’ve had problems with games locking up on me before, but not on a consistent basis like Dragon Ball.

Dragon Ball is a good game and presents the “three in a row” puzzle game in a unique new fashion. Good graphics and sound effects will keep you entertained until you’ve worn out all the levels, though there’s not much to bring you back for seconds. If it weren’t for the constant lock-up problem I have, I’d be a lot more eager to recommend this game, but in fairness to the product I will in this case provide two scores accordingly.

Cons:

Little replay value
Lock-up issues on my machine

Pros:

Unique twist to a seasoned puzzle game style
Quality audio and visual elements
Lots of levels

Overall:

8/10 (without the constant freezing)
5/10 (with the freezing problem)