Drakan's game play is an interesting mix of adventure, melee combat and flight combat, both indoors and outdoors. There are kinetic puzzles like in Tomb Raider, fights with an arcade feel, and air combat that feels like an arcade version of Descent. Unfortunately, none of them are done well or with depth.
The Tomb Raider adventure style of play in Drakan is very simple and spread out. It mainly involves hitting switches, dodging swinging blades, and jumping over obstacles. Just like Lara Croft, Rynn can do a wide variety of flips and rolls. Unlike Tomb Raider, there is no grabbing onto ledges, which cuts out a lot of puzzle variety. Everything has to be close enough to jump to. Also, instead of constant kinetic puzzles like in Tomb Raider, the puzzle parts of Drakan are spread all the game in little snippets. There's a gap in a bridge to jump here, a switch to press there. The adventure part of Drakan adds little to the game and is executed without depth.
The melee or weapon based combat of Drakan is equally without depth. It consists mostly of swinging your blade while trying not to get hit. The block feature is mostly useless since it takes far too long to bring up your defense. Most of the enemies are tougher and have a longer reach then you, so you spend your time jumping in range, slashing, then jumping out of range. There are some extra moves available if you do sequences of button pressing, but they're mostly useless moves as they tend to take longer to execute than just slashing away. The melee combat of Drakan is dull and simplistic.
The dragon mounted flight combat of Drakan is its most promising aspect, but it as well is a disappointment. Take the controls of any standard first-person shooter, let the jump button make you go up and crouch make you go down, and you have Drakan's flight control system. It's very simple, but inadequate for the job. You end up dodging around like in a Quake deathmatch, moving left and right, forward and backward, and constantly upward. Often times you will get upside-down and highly confused. Often when an enemy would fly close to us, we would completely lose our bearings and be unable to find them as we were repeatedly shot from an unknown angle. Having a separate set of flight simulator like controls would have been a much better way to design the flight system in Drakan.
