Dragon Stone Game | Walk Through and Strategy Guide

Enter the world of the knight in shining armor, off to rescue the damsel in distress! In this game, you enter a fantastical world of escalating challenges and all sorts of monsters dreamed up by the imagination of the creators.

Your player role is a knight in armor, and you enter the game in an attempt to convince the king that he is worthy of gaining the Princess’s hand in marriage, for she has fallen for this knight. You must go through deserts, swamps, gnarled forests, and navigate other hazardous lands, to collect coins and defeat all the enemies to restore peace to the King’s lands.

Like many games, you start out with 5 lives, and can lose them in any number of ways. However, there are perks and redemptions along the way that will allow you to keep plugging along. Since this is a downloaded game, you pay for it once, and you can play as often as you like; create new players to start over again, and no worries about needing to spend real money to advance in any reasonable time frame, as with so many games that are available online-only, such as “Battle Pirates” on Face Book.

Since this is supposedly medieval times, your weapon is a bow and arrow, from which you must fire stones to match up to other stones to remove them from the play field. At its most basic level, yes, this is another “match 3 or more colors” game. But there are enough twists, turns and challenges to keep even an adult player interested and striving to get to the end unscathed.

The game is at least loosely based upon a series of books of the same name.

There are two game play modes, adventure and puzzle. You must play through at least some of the adventure modes to unlock the puzzle modes. Each level you pass unlocks the corresponding puzzle of the same name.

Puzzle mode is a good place to practice, for you can keep repeating the level until you have it nailed down, whereas in adventure mode, each completed level takes you back to the map, where your knight marches on to the next challenge.

In adventure mode, there are several screens to complete in each level, and those are essentially puzzles in and of themselves, so the similarity to “puzzle mode” is most helpful.

In either mode, your quest is to get to the bottom of the puzzle, where you will be rewarded with a shining shield and crossed swords indicating you’ve made it to the end of that challenge.

You begin the game with 4 hearts (lives), and every time you take damage from an enemy, you lose one heart.

You can also lose a life by failing to keep up with the rising screen, for if any part of either the stones or the platforms on which they rest touch the red line at the top, it’s game over; you’re dead.

Interestingly, that nasty red line is invisible until you are dangerously close to contact, adding to the tension of the challenges.

For each screen challenge you complete, you will be awarded a rank, based up on how many coins you have collected, how many enemies you’ve beaten, how much damage, if any, you’ve taken, and your shot accuracy.

The ranks range through a series of 10 levels, from “vagabond,” in which you’ve essentially failed to get out of the starting gate, up through “vanquisher,” requiring great skill in shot accuracy and damage avoidance, needing a total of 25,000 points to attain. That’s essentially a “perfect” game, and is difficult.

As you progress down the screen towards the bottom and your final score, there will be coins to collect, as well as other assorted perks that can help you along the way.

For example, some areas have locks through which your bow and arrow cannot shoot stones, so you must look for the key, and catch it when it becomes freed by means of stones being cleared out, or by blowing up layers with available powder kegs and several other means of destroying layers en masse.

There are also other rewards besides the coins; there can be extra life or full-healing treasures to collect, and these may apply either to your bow and its attributes, or to the knight's own health.

Be careful, however; this requires quick action on the mouse, for sometimes there are traps! There are a few kinds of threats that are often located right with a key, or other desirable target, and if you don’t move quickly enough, you may catch the wrong thing, and do yourself in!

Sometimes keys or rewards are in plain sight, just ‘trapped’ and sometimes they are hidden inside treasure chests. Beware the treasure chests!! Sometimes, they contain coins, keys or rewards; other times, they contain one or another of the various threats! Quick eye-hand coordination is needed to spot what comes out and decide whether to snag or avoid.

To drop stones from your bow, you left-click your mouse. Every time your stone hits any others of the same color, resulting in a match of 3 or more, you will see those stones disappear. This is how you get through the game and avoid that dreaded red line at the top.

Some stones appear with a kind of shadowed and checkered design; these require extra matching stones before they turn to their normal color, and can be released.

To shoot arrows at targets and drop them out, which often helps with the release of other stones, and getting through the level, right-click the mouse.

If you have earned any kind of 'super shots' attributes for your bow, these can be activated by holding down the right mouse button until it fires. Use these wisely; they are time-limited, and it takes a while to re-charge the bow. With others, the special can be used only once per level screen.

Below, I’ve created a table of the various enemies you’ll encounter and must defeat. I’m sure they all have names assigned by the developers, but that is probably copyright protected, so I’m just listing them by what I think they look like, to give you a general idea.

I've only given the number of hits to defeat the enemy I've discovered in casual player mode. I have yet to master 'expert' mode, so I don't know what those numbers are; no doubt, higher and harder to do.

Obviously, I've not placed these in any kind of order as they are encountered, but it is true, as stands to reason, that the harder-to-defeat enemies are found in more advanced levels as you progress through the game.

Dragon Stone is produced by Pixel Storm in association with Play Pond Games, and is distributed through Game House Games as a download.

System requirements include:

• Windows XP, 2K or Vista,
• processor of P3 1.0 GHz or better,
• 512 MB or more of free memory.
• A 64MB DirectX 8.1 compatible video card is also needed.

This is a fun game to play. There are enough challenges and difficulties to keep you coming back, trying to better your previous scores, or beat another player.

While this is a single-player (one-at-a-time) game, there is the option to create additional profiles for other players in the household to have a go.

I've been through the full game myself about 3 times as of this writing, and mind you, I'm not playing it all the time every day! It has sat idle and un-played for as long as a year while 'real life' got in the way of fun and games.

One of these days, not too far down the road, though, I'm going to strap on my armor once again, and make an attempt at the expert level! Wish me luck!