Dragonero: The Rise of Draquir

Introduction

Dragonero: The Rise of Draquir, developed by Operaludica and published by Power Up Publishing on 26 September 2024, brings Sergio Bonelli Editore's Dragonero — one of Italy's best-selling ongoing fantasy comic series — to PC as a turn-based party RPG. Five heroes (Ian, Gmor, Myrva, Alben and Sera) each carry their own story thread through the world of Erondàr before those threads converge into a shared plot confronting the game's title threat. Structurally, it leans hard into an old-school CRPG shape: turn-based combat built around skill and item choices, ten dungeon settings split between hand-crafted and procedurally generated layouts, an open world strung together by events, and a fatigue system that requires the party to actually rest rather than grinding indefinitely.

What the comic's fans and genre veterans find here

For reviewers who came in already invested — either in the Dragonero comic or in the specific rhythm of vintage party-based RPGs — there's real substance to praise. One reviewer, self- identified as "a big fan of the comics," confirms the adaptation holds up for that audience specifically. Another, writing in Italian, describes a deliberate "vintage charm" built from the game's mechanics and difficulty, arguing it's a game that "gives you nothing" for free and rewards approaching it thoughtfully — a description that reads as a compliment from someone who wanted exactly that kind of challenge. The comic-style cutscenes draw specific, repeated praise as the game's visual highlight, a sensible strength given the source material, and the fatigue system gets credited with giving the open-world exploration actual stakes rather than letting the party simply push forward non-stop. A built-in level editor, unusual at this price point, is listed among the game's features without drawing complaint from anyone in the review sample.

Where it falls apart

The negative-review sample tells a strikingly consistent story, and it isn't really about the underlying RPG design — it's about the version of the game reviewers were actually handed. Translation quality is the single most repeated complaint: one reviewer calls it "terribly translated," with writing "difficult to read," while another separately reports "grammar errors, missing words, changing fonts and other 'bugs.'" A third goes further, calling the presentation "a visual nightmare" while explicitly noting "the game has a lot of heart, and could be absolutely amazing" if that layer were fixed — a phrasing that captures the split running through nearly every critical review in the sample: real sympathy for the design, real frustration with the version that shipped.

Not every negative review stops at presentation, though, and this is worth taking seriously rather than folding entirely into the localisation story. One self-described "big indie rpg fan" reports that combat, exploration and character creation were each individually "not fun" for them — a broader critique of the moment-to-moment design, not just its text and interface. That review is the exception rather than the rule in the sample gathered for this piece, but it's a useful check against reading every criticism here as merely cosmetic: at least one dedicated genre fan came away unconvinced by the core loop itself, not just its presentation. Whether that reaction reflects the combat system's actual depth or simply a rough first few hours before its systems click is not something this review can settle from outside actual play, and it's worth weighing against the far larger share of reviews focused specifically on text and interface quality rather than the underlying design.

Structure and value

It's worth being specific about what the "old-school" label actually buys here, since it's doing a lot of work in the positive reviews. A fatigue system that forces genuine rest planning, rather than letting a party grind indefinitely between fights, is a design choice that's fallen out of fashion in a lot of modern party RPGs in favour of frictionless pacing — bringing it back is exactly the kind of decision that will read as either "gives you nothing for free," in the approving Italian-language review's words, or as needless friction, depending on what a given player wants from the genre. Five converging character storylines and ten distinct dungeon settings, split between hand-authored and procedurally generated content, is a reasonably substantial structure for a $19.99 release, and nothing in the review sample suggests the game is short on content — the complaints are about how that content is presented and controlled, not how much of it there is. The included level editor is a genuine value-add at this price point that reviewers don't dispute, even if none of the sample gathered here reports using it directly.

Verdict

Dragonero: The Rise of Draquir is a case where the reviews split less on taste than on tolerance — for old-school pacing, and for the state the English version currently ships in. The comic-book pedigree, the fatigue-driven exploration and the five-hero structure give genre and franchise fans real reasons to stick with it, but the volume and specificity of the translation and interface complaints are hard to look past for anyone else, and at least one reviewer's flat rejection of the core combat and exploration loop is a reminder that presentation isn't the only open question here. A middling score reflects a game whose foundation reviewers largely respect sitting under a presentation layer several of those same reviewers say isn't ready yet.

Wanderer callout

The recurring "great bones, rough surface" verdict from Dragonero's own fans is a useful reminder of how much localisation quality shapes a first impression — the same reason Wanderer treats a hardcoded English fallback string as a real bug rather than a cosmetic one.