Century: Age of Ashes

Century: Age of Ashes is a solid, beautiful dragon-focused fantasy dogfighter that's within striking distance of greatness, once it hoards more content and balances its classes.

Century: Age of Ashes from Playwing is a good free-to-play game. It is gorgeous, easy to pick up and go, and has some competitive charm to it. The microtransactions and the thin amount of variety in the game might detour some from extending their time with dragon battling, but I think it’s certainly worth a look.

Century: Age of Ashes features excellent combat, incredibly fun and well thought-out modes, and striking visuals. So, if you want to control a customisable dragon in epic air-based battles then give it a go but make sure to play it responsibly.

Though the actual core mechanics of flying and fighting dragons in Century: Age of Ashes are both hugely satisfying and ably complimented by a decent set of game modes, the presently hefty paywalled economy means that players have little choice than to dive into their own pockets to buy the shinier cosmetic items. Coupled with a wildly inconsistent level of technical performance, it's clear that while developer Playwing has an intriguing online multiplayer effort on their hands, more work is required to balance out its economy and iron out the performance issues that otherwise detract from a highly enjoyable offering.

Season 1 of Century: Age of Ashes has really surprised us because of the excellent playability and a playful formula that tries, successfully, to get out of the classic canons of free to play.

For a free-to-play game, Century: Age of Ashes is actually really fun and quite innovative really. It could be likened perhaps to Star Wars: Squadrons in its dogfight style however this is fire-breathing dragons battling it out across a variety of beautifully drawn arenas!

Century: Age of Ashes has built a fantastic groundwork that, even months down the line, is worth investing time into. If Playwing could find a way to patch up holes in the new user experience, add a few new maps and modes by the end of Year 1, and pump up the player base, this would be one of the easiest recommendations I could make. As it stands though, it's a very tentative thumbs up from VGG. You might need to invest way more time than you might be interested in to get to the best of it, and that might be a hard sell, but I promise you there's something great waiting for you inside this rough and scaly surface.

All in all I've found myself disappointed with Century: Age of Ashes. There is a fairly solid central PvP F2P game here but nothing to make it stand out aside from the presentation. The modes are basic and repetitive and levelling up takes so long it seems set to encourage spending real money on cosmetic upgrades. On the surface this looked like the game my teenage self dreamed of, but like most teenage dreams, this mainly results in sore wrists and a feeling of shame and disappointment.

Despite a bumpy launch, Century: Age of Ashes is a unique experience that soars above a saturated market

Century: Age of Ashes looks stunning. The dragons, their skins, the eggs, and the maps are well modeled. The maps specifically are large and have tons of room and areas to explore, areas which can be used to one's advantage in the game. The game's weekly challenges are not averagely hard to complete. Spoils of War offers the most replayability in the game since it involves teamwork and having a working strategy to win the game. Despite this, the game suffers from poor matchmaking where people as high as level fifty are seen in the same matches as people below level ten. For instance, I've been matched with three level 50 in Gates of Fire, and it was the fastest and most frustrating game I ever played. This problem is seen in all game modes and could use some adjusting. The other thing is not a problem, but the game has a high skill gap where I had to rely on various YouTube channels that helped me improve on my movement, and tracking in-game. It takes a lot of practice, where it is common to see level 20 to 30 players with more losses than wins.