The graphics of Drakan: Order of the Flame are its high point. They're amazingly great looking, with nice textures, detailed land and water, cool fireballs and explosions, large open vistas, small cramped caverns, rain, snow, night and day. The graphics team that worked on Drakan deserves serious praise. They did an excellent job. The frame rates do get periodically strained at 640x480 with all quality set high on a Voodoo3 2000 PCI and a Celeron 300a @ 450 with 128MB of RAM. They run fine most of the time, but when things get busy on screen, they can drop dramatically. AMD users will be helped by 3DNow support. Still, the graphics are excellent and most of the performance was good.
The sound of Drakan is industry standard with A3D and EAX support. It works fine, but isn't going to win any awards. Voices are acted sufficiently well. The music is completely forgettable. At least, we think it is but we can't really remember it. Drakan is dead average in the sound department.
Psygnosis decided to use MPlayer as their vehicle for online play. Ok, we've said it before and we'll say it again, MPlayer blows goat chunks. We were astonished to find that we actually could get MPlayer to work at all. Of course, after downloading updates, fifty advertisements, a survey we were presented with three times, fifteen failed attempts, and an hour of frustration, we didn't really care. The positive thing about MPlayer and its vomitous multi-player system is, it makes it very difficult to get into Drakan's week multi-player games. Drakan is extremely lag sensitive, with a ping as low as 150 causing characters to jump around and move erratically. All the multi-player games are deathmatches or versions of deathmatch play. One person we were playing with thought that Drakan would be really fun in capture the flag. Of course, there is no capture the flag so we may never know. We think he was wrong anyway.
We received a letter from Stuart Denman of Surreal Software stating that there is also an in-game tracker for Drakan. We apologize for missing this feature. It is not obvious that it exists and the manual doesn't help much in this area. Look for a mention of it on page 28 of the manual in the "Joining a Game" section.
On the positive side, the in-game tracker makes getting into multi-player games that much easier. It also allowed us to witness someone cheating with an invincibility hack. As for the poor multi-player performance, Mr. Denman says that it is due to the use of Microsoft's DirectPlay and there will be a Winsock patch, currently in beta, to fix things up.