Draxis Review: Dreadnought on the PS4

With the addition of the PS4 in our house, I have been finding new games that I did not yet have on the XBox One. One of these new games was one I had actually seen for a while on facebook being advertised was a free to play game called Dreadnought. Today, I am planning on giving you my readers a small review of the game while it is still in Beta. On the 5th this game goes fully live from what I have seen and I am hoping it does nothing but grow and succeed. So without further ado let’s just jump right into this!

Over the years, I have fallen in love with games that put you in the driver’s seat of some of the best war machines. Starting with Tie-Fighter putting me in charge of the Empire’s finest snub fighters and continuing to present day with World of Tanks and World of Warships I have always loved this type of game and played them whenever I could get my hands on them. This game is on par with all of them and is a mixture of several of them. Take the warships from World of Warships and give them space flight and sci-fi powers from the various space games (Star Wars, Star Trek ect) and you’ll find yourself in the game Dreadnought.

Dreadnought is a 3rd person military vehicle shooter where you can use your weapons scopes to zoom in. This is very much like World of Warships and World of Tanks. Also similar to those games is the fact that you have a tech tree to work through and as you research new weapons you also get to research and upgrade to new space warships. Also like those other games there are special ships you can buy with real money or in game gold that you can buy with real money. These hero ships have better hp and weapons but are not too overly powerful, they will give you an edge without breaking the game for everyone. The in-game currency that you can buy has other similar uses to the WoT and WoW games in that it can be used to purchase skins for your ships and new colors, logo’s ect. This gold can also be used to change XP on a fully researched ship into free XP to use on other ships so that it’s not wasted.

A big difference that I have seen between the two game types is in World of Tanks and Warships you have to buy garage slots if you want to collect all of the different vehicles which is just layering money on top of money spent and in my mind is a predatory way of doing things. Our new writer Kathryn Asano has a blog about that here https://draxisweb.com/dwp/?p=3214. In Dreadnought however what you have are different fleet stages that can hold certain tiers of ships. So you can have all the ships you want it looks like but you can only choose between 5 of them at a time. So, you line up your 5 fave in the fleet you use and then choose between them for a game and if you want to switch it up then you just start changing your roster. This is a much better and nicer way to do things. This can be compared to how Clash Royale and  the other card games work…you have a ton of cards but you can only use like 8 here you have a bunch of ships but can only choose between 5 to switch in and out of during a game when you respawn

One big thing to know about this game is that for the most part the controls are pretty easy to get the hang of. For me though, the only weird thing was learning the touch pad controls as I have spent the last 10 years using XBox controllers, so this whole touch pad in the middle thing is brand new to me. However, this game takes the touchpad into consideration to give you even more control of your spaceship. I am loving some of the cool maneuvers you can come up with for example as a Dreadnought class ship I have combined my weapons and the warp jump into a hugely deadly combo. First I fire off my Vulture Missiles, then I turn a slight bit so I am pointing just off to the side of the enemy ship and once I a almost within 5m of the ship I hit my micro-jump. This small warp jump is great on the dread as it either gets you to your friends faster or can just bounce you straight ahead 5m. So once I have jumped ahead 5m I am now broadside of the enemy, my Vultures are ready to rain down on them any second and within a moment of reappearing beside my enemy my plasma broadside weapons have flashed that they have locked on. A quick button push and I have a barrage of plasma and missiles hitting the ship at the same time killing it’s shields and a good bit of hit points. If I haven’t fully killed it with that maneuver then I just unleash my secondary rapid fire guns on them and pepper them with whatever type of bullets or energy those fire until the ship goes down which is usually in just a few seconds.

In this game, strategy is very much needed. You see World of Tanks is just a shoot em up. Some Strategy is good but it honestly comes down to the luck of seeing where the enemy is and getting your shots off first and praying it can go through their armor before they kill you. In this game however, once you blow up it’s not game over (unless you’re playing a game type that does that like elimination) in your typical deathmatch and proving grounds it’s an all out war to the right amount of victory points. So you have to have some good strategy. Do you stand off and try to snipe? If you have a dreadnought do you warp in close and hope your hull can take a pounding as you reduce their smaller easier to kill ships to slag? If you have a healing ship (yup there are repair ships) do you try to stay close to your big ships and keep them alive through their daring close up maneuvers or do you stay back with the snipers and protect them from the smaller ships that may get past your dreads with their speed? Or as a healing ship do you pair up with another healing ship and go all out to protect your suicidal dread captain? Your healing him, the other ship is healing you while you heal him as well and a nice little almost unbreakable triangle occurs! I can’t tell you how many times I have cursed out the game when the AI got smart and used that tactic!

All in all I have to say that in my opinion if you like any of the World of (insert vehicle here) games or Star Wars or Star Trek starfighter games then I think you will love this game. I have had nothing but fun with this one so far even when cursing the ingenuity that the AI sometimes shows (yeah not used to a smart AI but sometimes they do good). The Graphics are great, the aps are lovely and not too large and the gameplay is fun. So, I rate this one highly and say go and download it….go on….NOW…and then leave your PSN Gamertag below or send me a friend request at XyanyaVieme and we can go and build a fleet together and take over the universe MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…I mean ummmm….we can defend the galaxy against tyranny yeah that’s it.

So join me and if you are playing this game, let me know what you think of it as well!