Xbox NA: November 3, 2003 Microsoft Windows RU: March 17, 2004[1] NA: June 14, 2004 WW: March 7, 2018 (Steam)
Developer(s):
Idol FX
Publisher(s):
WW: Majesco Sales RU: Noviy Disk
Country:
Sweden
"This game is what you get if somebody ate every badass dual-pistol wielding, trench coat-wearing late 90's action movie cliché, then barfed it out, ate the barf, and then dumped their ass into a piss-and-shit-stained bus station toilet, and then they took that rancid concoction, and somehow printed Xbox discs made out of it!"
"The tragic thing about Drake of the 99 Dragons is that you can see how the game might have turned out good. Unlike a lot of other games I've covered, it did have potential: the combat has a good variety of enemies, you have a good variety of techniques and weapons, and there is a good variety to the stages; switching it up between combat, big fixed shootouts and platfomring. But the game was just too damn rushed and the dev team didn't have time to get the game working properly. The combat is terribly-balanced, swamping the player with overpowered enemies and few means of surviving; both versions' combat systems are so broken, you can barely even damage enemies; almost every unique mechanic the game has is so poorly-implemented that it's useless; and the final nail in the coffin is how severely underwritten the story is with bland characters you don't know a thing about, doing clichéd things to fight over plot-points you also don't know a thing about; and Drake himself is a terrible protagonist — a dumb block of muscle with brooding gruffness and '90s clichés in place of actual personality or a character arc. This game is a perfect example of how rushing a product to market can completely tank a good idea. This could have something special. Instead, it fully earns its ranking among the "worst games ever made"."
— Darklordjadow1
"Many people ask, is Drake of the 99 Dragons based on an existing comic book? No, it's not. But if it were, that comic would suck."
— Adam Sessler
Drake of the 99 Dragons is a third-person shooter game developed by Idol FX and published by Majesco Sales for the Xbox in 2003, and Microsoft Windows in 2004. It is considered by many reviewers as one of the worst games of all time.
The PlayStation 2 version of the game was planned but canceled for unknown reasons, though it could be due to the game's negative reception.
Drake, an undead assassin, must avenge the death of his master and his clan by getting back the Soul Portal Artifact which was stolen by Tang who plans to use it to fuel a robot army with souls to conquer the world.
Gameplay
Drake wields two guns at all times. He obtains various abilities throughout the game, such as double-jumping and slowing down time. He regains health by taking the souls of his fallen enemies. In the Xbox version Drake auto aims while in the Windows version, there is an aiming reticle.
Why It Sucks 99 Times
NOTE: Most of the flaws listed below are based on the Xbox version, as both Steam and PC versions play much better, but even then some stuff is not fixed.
Executive Meddling: Much of the reason for many of the game's problems was that the developers were given only eighteen months to launch the beginning of what was supposed to be a multimedia franchise while already being stretched thin with many other games, two of which were released around the same time.
Awful graphics and animation that are similar to late PS1 or N64 games and look bad for 2003 standards despite having cel-shaded graphics, though this can only really be seen on Drake. The rest of the graphics just look ugly and terrible. The character models aren't any better either, Drake in particular looks like he has no teeth and regularly has a weird, slack-jawed expression on his face. XIII (2003) came out the same year and has better cel-shading graphics than this.
Speaking of which, Majesco Sales's logo in the Xbox version is immediately blurred out as if they didn't want anyone to know they are behind this game.
The camera in the Xbox version moves too fast; it's difficult to make it stay where you want it to.
Aiming is horrible due to both the crosshair and the camera being controlled with the right thumbstick, there is also an auto-aim that barely does its job as most of the time it misses its targets.
The game does allow you to center the camera on enemies when the crosshair appears over them by clicking the right thumbstick, but this information can only be found in the instruction manual and it doesn't fix the aiming problems.
On top of all that, wherever you aim is not where you'll shoot, you shoot in the direction of where Drake's arms are aiming, which makes it very hard to shoot enemies since his arms aren't animated correctly leading them to flail his arms everywhere when he's moving.
The voice acting is laughably bad due to how exaggerated and cartoony the voices are and almost all of the performances sound so phoned in.
The pre-rendered cutscenes have lots of stiff animations and some characters don't even open their mouths when they talk.
The story is terrible as you're just thrown into a conflict between a clan and its rival without a clear explanation as to why everything is happening and who anyone is. Who are the 99 Dragons? What are their motives? Why does Tang want to take over the world? Why were they beating a dead white whale for its soul? The main character's backstory is also heavily rushed, it just shows how he got his tattoo and nothing else.
The physics is very poor, more specifically the jumping and wall-running. Jumping doesn't have any weight and feels floaty; controlling Drake while in the air is also really stiff. The wall running is even worse since you have to double-jump into a wall to get it to work, but it can take multiple tries just to get to work. The worst part is that some levels require wall-running to progress.
Lots of artificial difficulties:
There are no checkpoints nor is there a quicksave feature, meaning when you die, you restart at the beginning of the level.
Every level has a timer which is pointless since the player is never in a situation where something major happens like a timed explosion. When you run out of time, it's game over, though this isn't much of an issue since there isn't a moment where the timer is not enough to get to the end level, and there are times when the timer increases.
Every time you die, the game goes into a loading screen, and then you are forced to wait ten seconds to respawn while the spirit gods 'mock you and when the timer runs out, there is another loading screen. However, this can all be avoided when pressing the pause button and restart level after dying and getting the game over text.
The falling damage is extremely inconsistent; frequently you'll die falling from shorter distances than you'll survive. Even worse when taking a long drop is the only option forward. Sometimes you also take damage for no reason.
Poor A.I: Most of the enemies are incredibly basic with most rushing towards the player. They're also so dumb that it's very easy to take advantage of them since you can kill them from afar and some won't attack if you don't enter a room.
There is one glitch where when chasing a guy in the third level he goes in the opposite direction and runs into the acid, though the level can still be continued as if nothing happened, and this problem can be fixed by restarting the level.
For a game that's supposed to be about an assassin, there are no elements of stealth. Drake doesn't even fight like an assassin, he just bangs into a room full of enemies with guns blazing.
Most of the abilities are worthless and some are difficult to use. For instance, you obtain the ability to draw in or detonate souls, but to activate it, you need to respectively hold down the white or black button while shooting the enemies (information which again, can only be found in the instruction manual). If you try using it after an enemy dies nothing happens.
Some things in the game make no sense and its story is full of holes, such as;
When Drake "kills" Tang's hologram.
The spirit gods constantly waste their time creating a Drake avatar rather than bringing his original body or creating hundreds of Drake avatars to make the job easier.
How was Drake in his spirit form able to get his master's physical form to the spirit realm?
How is Drake's Mater's body fully intact after defeating the cyborg version of him when he was just a head one scene ago?
Drake and his master got killed at the beginning of the game with another Drake seeing this; who is this Drake supposed to be and how did he not realize he was killed?
Drake charged headfirst into a room, and he suddenly got turned around.
Some souls of Drake's clan members end up hurting him.
The Ghost Assassin gives the soul portal artifact to the courier rather than taking it straight to Tang. This said Ghost Assassin can fly, by the way.
All the characters are one-dimensional as they're given no characterization, no development, interactions, or chemistries. There are only a few characters in the game, and the one character we do spend time with, Drake, is poorly written and a total idiot. In the opening cutscene, he is in a dojo playing with two unloaded pistols, as ProJared said "It's like a 10-year-old who got into his dad's gun cabinet.". Not only does he have internal monologues in almost every cutscene, but when he first gets his power of immortality, the first thing he does is throw himself out of a window and kill himself. He gets killed enough times throughout the game that the Spirit Gods finally give up and make him use his original, bullet-hole-riddled body which ends up disappearing later. He is also a hypocrite, as when he discovers the villains' plans about harvesting souls, he decides to stop them; yet, he spends the rest of the game shooting people to harvest their souls.
The production values are so low that not only does a female boss use the same death sound as the male enemies but the sound for when doors open was stolen from AOL Instant Messenger sign-off.
Cliché Storm: The game heavily relies on clichés and stereotypes. Drake can be mistaken for an undead Neo with a Bruce Wayne chin sporting a "cool" look with a "badass" long coat but suffers from being an idiot spewing bad dialogue ("You must be out of this world"). The Master is a typical old bare-chested man with a funny beard. Tang is a typical evil rich man wanting to take over the world and is in contact with a supreme lord.
During the final levels, the player is required to do a large amount of platforming, which is made near impossible due to the bad controls and floaty jumping.
The final boss is easy to beat because all you need to use is shoot the skeletons and simply not look at the boss after that simply stay there and shoot him till he dies.
False advertising: The box art features giant robots that never appear in the actual game, other than the robot that attacked Drake in the dojo at the beginning of the game which was human-sized.
Redeeming Qualities
The PC port (while still poor) fixes a lot of the bugs and glitches that the original Xbox version had and the controls are significantly improved.
The side comic book is the best part of this game.
The loading screens are nice to look at.
It has a nice Saturday Morning cartoon vibe to it.
The soundtrack is nice and very catchy to listen to, despite being repetitive, one example is disco music.
This product belongs to the "Severe Zone" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.
Drake of the 99 Dragons was met with a very negative reception, and is considered to be one of the worst games of the 2000s decade. The game holds an aggregate score of 22/100 on Metacritic, ranking it as the second-worst game for the original Xbox.[2] It is also ranked as the second to worst game on the Xbox on GameRankings, with a ranking of 20.48%.[3]
X-Play's Adam Sessler gave Drake of the 99 Dragons a 1 out of 5, claiming that "there's no reason to buy this game, no reason to rent this game, no reason to say any more about this game."
Internet reviewer ProJared gave the game a bucket of tears (1) out of 10 and explained that nothing was redeeming about the game and that you're better off beating yourself over the head with another game for six hours than buying this game.
Internet reviewer Joueur du Grenier reviewed this game along Beverly Hills Cop in an episode centered on bad games of the sixth generation, criticizing the stupid storyline, the bad controls, and the game over sections that drag on. He mistakenly claims that the character design was done by Bruce Timm (note: the art imitates his style, but Timm had no involvement in this).
The game appeared as No. 10 on WatchMojo.com's "Top 10 Worst Video Games" list and also appeared as No. 64 on Tats TopVideos' Top 100 Worst Games.
Despite the negative reception, it received a mixed reception on Steam with a score of 63% (although a majority of the positive reviews are sarcastic).[4]
Trivia
The game was supposed to be the launchpad of a planned multimedia franchise including a series of comic books and an animated series, but the planned franchise was canceled following the failure of the game.
Majesco gave Idol FX only 6 months to develop the game, and the short production gave little room for the playtesting of the game which explains the game's unfinished state.
"What were they thinking?"