Now THAT'S a Big Dragon!

Recruit warriors, wizards, thieves, bards and clerics, throw them at one enormous, roaring dragon, watch the damage numbers climb until the kingdom is saved. Now THAT'S a Big Dragon!, released 26 August 2026 by Cotovelo Games, wears its own pitch in its exclamation point, and reviewers who put real time into it mostly agree it earns the enthusiasm — with one significant structural gap the developer is now visibly working through in public.

A satisfying "one big target" loop

The comparison reviewers reach for most often is Swarm Simulator, and it's an apt one: you're building an army whose composition matters, not just its size. A detailed review that beat the game lays out the unit types by name — warriors, wizards, elves, thieves, bards and clerics — and describes real synergy between them rather than a single dominant strategy. Another reviewer specifically completed a full playthrough using only thieves, treating the game's unit variety as a self-imposed challenge run, which is the kind of engagement a shallow incremental rarely earns. A third calls the graphics "clean as HECK" and the escalating damage numbers satisfying once enough time has been invested to scale up.

Completion time matters a lot to how this game reads, and the numbers vary sharply depending on what "finished" means. One frequently-echoed complaint says the main mode is over in under two hours, with everything after "just repeating the same thing with slight variations." But a reviewer who tracked their own progress to full completion — all four chapters and their achievements — logged just under ten hours, calling it "a good fun incremental game" throughout. Both figures are honest; they're just measuring different things, and a buyer weighing the length complaint should know it mostly applies to the first chapter alone, not the whole four-chapter arc.

The gap reviewers agreed on, and the roadmap answering it

The most substantive criticism at launch was structural rather than a matter of taste. "WITHOUT any sort of prestige mechanic to at least speed things up," reads one detailed review, describing later chapters as tedious repeats of the same loop with a new resource bolted on. Another independently calls the dungeon system, meant to be a source of ongoing interest between chapters, "pointless" and "tacked on," saying they interacted with it twice before ignoring it entirely. A resource- management game mode drew a sharper complaint still: random events reportedly wipe accumulated units with no compensating benefit, which one reviewer summarised as being punished for progress rather than rewarded for it.

This is where the developer's public response is worth detailing precisely, because it's still in progress rather than finished, and that distinction matters for anyone buying today. On 4 September, Cotovelo Games shipped "Version 1.1.0 - The all new Dungeon Artifacts feature," explicitly framed as "the first of three big updates planned." Artifacts found in dungeons now "persist across chapters," meaning a dungeon run in chapter one can meaningfully strengthen chapter four — directly targeting both the "pointless dungeon" and "no persistence between chapters" complaints in one system. The same post names what's coming next without hedging: "Part 2: A new currency and upgrade tree that persist across chapters" — the prestige-adjacent system negative reviewers were explicitly asking for — and "Part 3: An improved endless level."

That's a specific, sequenced, publicly committed roadmap responding directly to named complaints, not a vague promise to "keep listening." This review can confirm Part 1 shipped as described; it can't yet confirm whether Parts 2 and 3 land as promised, since they hadn't at the time of writing.

A smaller but telling data point

One reviewer reported losing a full day of accumulated progress to what they assumed was a missing autosave, only for the developer to reach out directly and say the game saves every second and the loss may have been a glitch rather than a systemic gap. This review has no way to adjudicate which account is correct — but the fact that the developer is responding to individual reports by name, on a $6.99 indie release nine days old, fits the same pattern as the roadmap update: a small studio actively present in its own reviews rather than absent from them.

What the completion data shows

The achievement curve supports the "genuinely playable to the end" read: 66% of players have beaten the main game, and 21.9% have already cleared New Game Plus — respectable numbers for a release under two weeks old. The rarest achievement, for the true endless mode's furthest dungeon level, sits at 13.6%, suggesting a real subset of players pushing well past the content the "two hours and done" complaints describe.

The verdict

Now THAT'S a Big Dragon! earns a 6.5. The core loop is a well-executed, well-liked take on the grow-an-army-fight-one-boss structure, with real character variety rewarding players who dig into it. Its most serious structural gap at launch — nothing carrying progress or purpose between chapters — is being closed in full public view, with the first of three promised updates already delivered inside two weeks of release, which is a faster and more transparent response than most indie incrementals manage.

Buy it now if the premise appeals to you and you're comfortable buying into a game whose deepest systems are still arriving in stages; the roadmap gives good reason for confidence they will. Wait for Parts 2 and 3 if you specifically want the persistent-progression structure most incrementals promise from day one.

If a growing army against one big threat sounds appealing but you'd rather the persistent-progression systems already existed rather than being promised, Wanderer has spent years building exactly that kind of long-term structure into every corner of its own world.