Reign of Fire (GameCube)

In the Human element of the game you have to drive around the game areas completing various mission objectives while shooting at the hordes of ancient beasts. You start with just a machine gun hitched to the back of a jeep to fight the flaming brutes, and as the game progresses you pick up lots of new and pretty looking weapons to add to your arsenal. In Dragon mode you get to swoop around spitting fire balls and terrorising the poor humans; it really is great fun--you can even pick up vehicles and throw them around.

Reign of Fire offers two different control methods: a simple mode and a more advanced aiming setup in which you use the right analogue stick to aim with; it's hard to start with but very effective once you're used to it.

Overall, Reign of Fire is a fun and polished title which makes you think what a great film the movie could have been. --Laurent S Hall

After less than five minutes playing, I had made a substantial link between this game, and a ‘War of the Worlds’ based game I had on the Playstation many moons ago. I actually though that if you were to replace fire-breathing dragons with heat-ray wielding Martians, you have that very game. Not that I'm sayng it's an unoriginal game, I'm just saying what I thought. In my mind, the games have a similar feel to them, and as I like the WOTW one, it may be why I like Reign of Fire as much as I do.

As the humans, your goal is pretty much the same as it was in the movie: take back the planet. Of course, this is done by some good old-fashioned dragon slaying, but you also get several missions where the objective doesn’t simply boil down to “kill dragons so we can do this”.

Playing as the dragons, it’s all about kicking human behind. Which is fun. You get to breath napalm, spit fireballs and toss vehicles and humans around. It’s fun, but the controls can become annoying, especially when you have planes buzzing you from every side and things shooting you from the ground.

The choice of two different control systems is a nice touch. The more advanced set-up is useful for being able to shoot at something without facing it, useful when trying to outrun a hoard of dragons spitting fire at you! Then you have the basic control option. Nice to get you settled, but the biggest drawback is that your weapon always follows the direction your vehicle is facing, mean that in order to shoot something while putting distance between yourself and it, you have to reverse, and that usually just doesn’t have the speed you need to keep out of harms way.

Is it challenging? In my eyes, it is, but it also could have been a little harder. Sometimes you’ll thi9nk something is impossible, but after a few attempts, you’ve usually cracked it and find it easy. Maybe I just want everything to be impossible?

Now, visual and audio quality. I found both were good, the graphics did become a little choppy and the frame rate did stutter on occasions, but it didn’t really effect the overall game play. And the audio? Excellent, the voice-overs are great and the sound effects rock.

I’ll give it a total of 4 stars. I like the game as a whole, but feel some aspects are a little rough around the edges and could have used a fair bit more polishing before release. Sure, I have better games in my collection, but I also have worse ones. I had considered giving it 3 stars, but decided that it’s only fair it gets 4 because of how much fun I get out of it and how often it finds itself back in my ‘Cube.


The Rise and Fall of " Reign of Fire"   December 21, 2002
Adam Soccorsi (Detrriot, Michigan)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful

I came into playing this game with very high hopes of playing a wonderfully crafted and visualy stuning brillance. I longed for the great battles between helicopters, and other various air craft with the productions stars, the dragons. But instead I got a very choppy game play, horrible controls and sometimes unrealiabe graphic rates. The one redeeming aspect of this game was that the sound quality and voice actors were above par in many aspects. I give the designers kudos for having the difficult task of making cinema into video game, but even with nobel intentions, they failed on to many levels to deserve a higher rating.