Drakan - The Ancients' Gates

The odd thing about Drakan is that its best idea is also its biggest design problem. You control Rynn, a warrior woman bonded to a dragon named Arokh, and the game splits its time between fighting on foot and fighting from his back. Both halves are appealing on paper. In practice they feel like two games sharing a story, and the join between them shows.

On the ground, Rynn is a third-person melee fighter with a growing collection of weapons and a modest set of spells. Combat is built on swinging, blocking and picking your moment, and it has some weight when the camera cooperates. Often it does not. The camera is the first thing that shows the game's PC origins, and the controls, adapted from mouse and keyboard to a gamepad, take some getting used to. Aiming and turning in tight spaces can be a real fight of its own.

The dragon sections are where the game aims highest. Arokh breathes fire, strafes enemy positions and lets you cross open landscapes that feel larger than most action adventures of the period. Flying is fun mainly in short bursts. Targeting is loose, and the missions often reduce to clearing a defined area of enemies. Still, the scale gave the game a sense of ambition that many contemporaries lacked.

The PS2 version of The Ancients' Gates arrived as a follow-up to the original PC game, and it shows the strain of the hardware. Draw distances close in, and environments can look sparse and foggy. Dungeons and caves fare better than outdoor areas, where the sense of scale falters. The story is standard fantasy fare about a threat to the land and a hero chosen to stop it, told adequately but without much personality.

Played today, it is a flawed curiosity rather than a forgotten classic. The structure is uneven and the controls demand patience. But the central pairing of woman and dragon is still a charming premise, and few games of the era gave you a mount that mattered this much to the fighting. It is a reminder that the PS2 years were full of ideas bigger than the tools available to build them.