The idea of riding a dragon is inherently cool, but lackluster textures and dull sound effects were all I could see when playing Crimson Dragon. Instead of feeling like I’m controlling a powerful beast, this mostly on-rails shooter feels more like flying a kite. It’s not a bad shooter, but it comes with major caveats like a few frustrating encounters, repetitive environments, and heavy doses of RPG-like grinding.

When you’re just flying and shooting, Crimson Dragon handles fine, but doesn’t do anything special. The constant stream of dragon fire doesn’t feel powerful for the first five or six hours. Most stages play out like fun roller coaster rides, and the controls are traditional and intuitive. The camera helpfully moves around your dragon and keeps track of where enemies are, for the most part. Loading

Developers Grounding and Land Ho! integrated a fairly deep RPG upgrade structure where feeding dragons unlocks special moves. Each dragon has an affinity like Fire, Wind, Light, etc, but fortunately they aren’t pigeonholed to those types – so a fire-based creature can learn wind attacks, for example. The repetitive structure did start to wear on me before a new dragon was added to my stable, but at least that comes with the enticing possibility of discovering a bigger dragon with better stats and stronger abilities.

The rider also has an independent leveling system that unlocks more dragons for purchase, but it takes a long time to land anything powerful. Replaying levels or starting new ones is the only way to increase a rider level. But the fact that Crimson Dragon reuses so many areas causes repetition to set in quickly. And you have to constantly revisit these areas in order to discover the required random drop that will let you into the next stage.

It’s in the more open timed levels against bosses that things lead to frustration. These free-flying stages take you off the rails, but don’t give you the tools you need to navigate that way. You can speed up or slow down but never really stop or hover, so I’d constantly sail past a boss’ weak points over and over again… until time expired. I like the challenge of a difficult fight, but when it’s a clock that beats me instead of the enemy, it takes some of the fun out of battle. It helps a bit that maps are small, but a simple hover function would have made things much less frustrating. Loading

With the gold you earn from completing levels, you can hire Assistant wingmen to back you up in battle, but ultimately they feel like a flimsy waste of money. The big problem is that their stats aren’t good enough to be useful. Two dragons are better than one, but in timed missions and evasive bosses would get away because the two of us just weren’t strong enough to defeat it. Sometimes I would luck out and find a more capable wingman with a name like “Kickassius Clay.” Other times, they were so bad I wished a flying oversized enemy would put our miserable team out of commission. Usually, they did.