"Gacha stripped out, tag-team combos left gloriously intact"
About
DragonSword: Awakening is an anime-styled open-world action RPG set on the Continent of Orbis, where a dragon stirs after sixty years of quiet and you set out to stop it. You recruit companions and fight in tag-team parties of three, swapping characters mid-combo to chain attacks and trigger status ailments. Each character carries four skills: two on cooldown, two that fire off inflicted status effects. Between fights you explore, solve light traversal puzzles, ride mounts, grind gear and materials, and unlock new party members through story progress. Built in Unreal Engine 5, it began life as a free-to-play title and launched on Steam with the gacha monetization stripped out for a flat 30 euro price.
Verdict
DragonSword: Awakening does the rare thing of taking a free-to-play skeleton and paying off the paywall for you, and the tag-team combat is genuinely satisfying once three characters are chaining ailments into each other. The catch is everything the old model left behind: a thicket of currencies that serve no purpose in a paid single-player game, plus a dodge and jump that fight the action they're attached to. Presentation and optimisation punch above the price, and controller support is clean out of the box. It's an easy recommendation for anyone hungry for this style without the monetisation, provided the odd crash and the mobile-era menus don't grate.
You'll like it if …
- +You want the character-swap combo feel of a live-service action RPG without daily logins or a cash shop
- +You enjoy building a party around status ailments and setting your own grind pace
- +You value strong optimisation and Steam Deck play over a headline story
You'll dislike it if …
- −Overlapping upgrade currencies and RNG stat rolls wear you down
- −You need reactive dodging with invulnerability frames to enjoy melee combat
- −Korean-only voices and rough translated text pull you out of a game
Breakdown
- +Swapping between three characters mid-combo to keep a chain alive is the loop players return to, and it reads as fluid rather than fiddly
- +Status-triggered skills reward setting up an ailment on one character and cashing it in with another
- +Controller feel is snappy from the first minute, no dead-zone tuning required
- −Jumping cancels your sprint momentum, so a sprint-jump-land sequence drops you back to a walk
- −Dodging grants no invulnerability frames, which undercuts any reactive play against aggressive enemies
- −Enemy hitboxes reach past their visible model, and lock-on can drift onto the wrong target
- +No stamina timers or daily time gates, so you set your own pace through the content
- +Team-building leaves real room to favour certain characters and ailment combinations
- +Items that look like noise early on gain clear uses as you progress
- −A stack of overlapping currencies for armor, skills, reputation and achievements survives from the free-to-play design and clutters progression
- −RNG stat rolls and card-inventory sorting feel imported from a mobile grind rather than built for a paid single-player RPG
- +Characters are expressive enough that skipping dialogue stops being reflexive
- +The writing leans into humour and the Korean voice work carries it well
- −The save-the-world plot is standard JRPG fare and clearly sits behind the combat in priority
- −Boss names and menu lines suffer from rough machine translation, with stray text errors throughout
- −Audio is Korean-only, no English or Japanese dub
- +The anime art direction and character animation hold up under scrutiny
- +Unusually well optimised for a UE5 open world, hitting 70-90fps on low and running cleanly on Steam Deck
- +Korean voice recording is high quality
- −Frame rate sags in crowded cities and large battles, with GPU load spread unevenly
- −A minority hit hard crashes and freezes that read as unplayable until patched
- +UI stays clean, looting happens instantly while you sprint, and camera transitions don't stall the action
- +Mechanics arrive gradually instead of front-loading a wall of tutorials
- −The UI glitches so that button labels or their icons vanish, leaving you guessing at inputs
- −Mouse smoothing has no toggle, and camera settings lack basic options
- −Inconsistent save-corruption warnings and navigation lag point to unfinished polish
score
