Review: RuneScape: Dragonwilds (Switch 2) – A Slow-Burn Survival-Crafting RPG That Underwhelms Visually

A few years ago when I tried Old School RuneScape for the first time, I spent hours puttering around the starting area taking on basic quests, chopping down trees, and slaying goblins in the surrounding wilds. After each lengthy session, I would exit the game, lean back in my chair with a contented smile, and realise that I had accomplished essentially nothing of note.

This is the quintessential RuneScape experience: an MMO so expansive and storied that you could easily drop hundreds of hours into it without seeing or doing half of what’s available. The goal isn’t so much to progress as it is to simply exist in the game’s fantasy world, engaging in activities both exciting and mundane that slowly but surely add up and strengthen your character’s abilities. Put otherwise, the grind is kind of the point.

So perhaps it’s a mark of authenticity more than anything that despite its more focused scope and shift to survival game mechanics, RuneScape: Dragonwilds inspires these same feelings within me. With the spin-off title’s launch on Switch 2, I spent just south of 55 hours working my way through the main questline, yet it feels like I have barely scratched the surface.

In keeping with genre contemporaries like Minecraft and Valheim, Dragonwilds plunks you down with virtually nothing to your name in a world full of things that are trying their absolute darndest to put you in an early grave. As you traverse the dragon-ravaged continent of Ashenfall, you’ll need to constantly manage your health, stamina, hunger, thirst, and rest meters while accumulating resources to craft armour, weapons, material processing stations, and other items that improve your odds of survival and give you a chance at fighting back.

This core loop of gather-craft-fight-gather is what defines Dragonwilds. While it technically has a linear narrative, it serves as little more than a backdrop to your character’s personal ascension to an ultra-powerful dragon slayer.

The main campaign is broken into five major sections, each centred on a specific portion of the map. To progress through each section, you’ll need to push into its corresponding zone, gather new materials to raise your armor level and weapon power, and complete several sub-objectives before taking on the area’s final boss.

Don’t expect to breeze through it, though, as Dragonwilds can feel brutally punishing at times. The world is dense (perhaps a tad too dense) with enemies that can and will hunt you down the moment they are alerted to your presence. You’ll often have to face off against foes that exceed your current armour level, meaning that a single hit or two can spell death for your character. This makes even relatively basic tasks like gathering clay from the local swamp biome quite the perilous endeavour.

Your chances mostly revolve around how well you’re able to get to grips with the game’s combat, a system which feels somewhat at odds with itself. There’s no room for button mashing here, as you’re encouraged to learn each mob’s attack patterns and make good use of your blocking and dodging abilities to avoid incoming hits and respond in kind.

You’ve got a healthy range of attack options on tap, including melee, ranged, and spellcasting weapons, and each comes with their own host of benefits and ideal use cases. To its credit, it’s a combat system that actually requires you to determine your optimal strategy, practice your manoeuvres, and generally think before you start swinging.

Unfortunately, these core principles tend to fly out the window when the vast majority of enemy encounters involve swathes of monsters flanking you at the same time. Trying to simultaneously read the actions of multiple opponents, including enemies that bombard you with ranged homing attacks, while nailing dodge rolls and parries with precise timing can get very overwhelming — especially when you’re spending a good portion of the game fighting opponents who outclass your current power level.

There is undeniably a certain amount of “gitting gud” expected here, and the game’s commitment to putting you in tough situations may satisfy those seeking a game with bite. That said, I tried very hard to find a rhythm for combat and it never quite clicked for me. I’m not above admitting that I spent a significant amount of the runtime spamming healing items and cheesing fights by hitting enemies with magic attacks from places where they couldn’t hit me back. Suffice to say, that strategy didn’t feel particularly rewarding.

You’ll be doing quite a lot of fighting, too. While there’s a fairly small amount of story objectives, the game’s length stems from the time you need to spend battling enemies and farming the proper items to facilitate progression. You’ll constantly find yourself needing a specific material to finish a quest, only to find that you get it by mixing it with another resource that you can only obtain by mining with the area’s corresponding pickaxe, and to get the pickaxe you need to gather the area’s specialised wood with a powerful-enough logging axe, which you need to craft using another material that is a combination of three other items and…you get the picture.

This grind feels less intense when you’re taking your time and passively accumulating resources, but it can nevertheless get pretty egregious in the mid-to-late game areas. It also just feels deflating when you spend hours and hours gathering all the necessary resources to craft new equipment that can stand toe-to-toe against an area’s toughest enemies, only for those items to immediately become underpowered as soon as you step foot in the next area.

At the same time, I can’t deny that there is a certain catharsis to entering each oppressively difficult new zone and struggling through until you can find a foothold — any foothold — to start building yourself back up again.

Of course, you’ll also suffer far less if you invest time into activities that aren’t required for the main story, and there are quite a lot of ways to spend your in-game days. Dragonwilds features a surprisingly robust base-building system, allowing you to craft your dream home (or homes) to your liking. You can also engage in crop farming and fishing to more efficiently obtain resources for healing items, or explore optional dungeons and other points of interest for useful loot.

The game also smartly borrows RuneScape’s skill level system, which sees you leveling up your prowess at different activities like combat, rune crafting, and movement individually. This system helps you feel like whatever activity you’re choosing to engage in is contributing to your character’s overall capability, even if the moment-to-moment improvements are near imperceptible.

At every turn, Dragonwilds sends a clear message that it is not the sort of game you mindlessly plough through. It is possible to do that, but it feels much more rewarding if you’re willing to live and breathe its world and spend hours chilling out and slowly accumulating materials. It is a journey that tastes far sweeter when it’s savoured — though you might question how much time you want to spend here based on the mixed quality of the Switch 2 port.

Credit where it is due: performance-wise, Dragonwilds runs alright on Switch 2. The game sticks to a fairly consistent 30fps cap, though there are some instances when things get a little extra frame-y. Encountered bugs were also fairly minor, mostly amounting to some textures popping in and out, a recurring issue where I couldn’t navigate specific menus, and a lone instance where the game crashed.

The sore spot is, by far, the visuals, as the game outputs a disappointingly blurry resolution in both handheld and docked mode. The lighting system is also downright busted, with lit areas often looking far too overexposed.

You don’t just have to take my word for it — as I wrote this review, developer Jagex released an open letter acknowledging that “the Switch 2 build is not where we want it to be today, visually.” The team has promised to improve the game’s visuals in the future, but it is nevertheless disappointing that Dragonwilds arrived on Nintendo’s platform in this state.