Reign of Fire | DJcube

The world has been overtaken by dragons. Play as a dragon or human – and fight back.

NA release: 26th November 2002
EU release: 29th November 2002
JP release: N/A
Developer: Kuju London
Publisher: BAM! Entertainment
NGC Magazine Score: 59%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Reign of Fire is based on the rather forgettable dragon film of the same name, where dragons (which are just monsters and not intelligent beings like most interpretations) have taken over the planet. I did find an interesting difference between the stories of both. In the film, the Americans that travel to Britain to save the world end up being immensely incompetent and mess loads of things up. In the game, this aspect is removed and the Americans are straight up heroes.

Most of the game is a vehicle-based shooter where you blow up countless dragons. It makes out that dragons are a huge threat, but then throws dozens of the adult dragons at you by the third mission. There are standard controls or controls similar to Halo (where the vehicle turns to go the direction you’re pushing the analogue stick, yet it’s not responsive at all, with massive turning circles that result in bumping into loads of things. Aiming is also ridiculously slow, with zero sensitivity options, although there is an option to turn off the “feature” which resets vertical aiming. Trying to aim while pointing in the sky is a nightmare, which is quite an issue for a game about shooting dragons.

There’s also a short additional campaign where you play as a dragon, but this is also plagued by control issues. Aiming is, once again, unresponsive and your dragon’s stamina (used to stay still) is so low that you don’t have enough time to aim at a target while hovering. The missions of both campaigns are also very dull, with the human missions mainly being escort missions, with the vehicles you’re escorting driving extremely slowly, which is made even worse by the whole game being a mess of ugly grey textures.

Reign of Fire was the first game from Kuju London, who somehow went from this to making Battalion Wars for Nintendo.

Poor

Most parts of the landscape, including trees, rocks, and anything you’ve shot out of the sky, can be driven straight through, as if they don’t exist, while others such as tiny bits of barbed wire, are completely immovable. The fiddly car handling and unreliable collision detection make precise manoeuvring (when trying to get a power-up, for example) unnecessarily difficult. It’s a long way from Halo.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #76

Remake or remaster?

Not needed for this.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Reign of Fire.