Runescape Dragonwilds Switch 2 Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
I have never played RuneScape in my life, but after seeing RuneScape: Dragonwilds in a recent Nintendo Direct, I was really interested in stepping into this world for the first time. A survival high-fantasy game filled with goblins, dragons, magic, and MMO DNA at its core? It sounded like it could be a winning combination to me. But having just wrapped up my Valheim review, the question is… will I survive another survival game? What’s It Like? Craft your tools, set up your farming plots, and prepare for battle as we review RuneScape: Dragonwilds for Nintendo Switch 2.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds takes us to Ashenfall, a forgotten continent where dragons have awakened and claimed the land for themselves. At the centre of the uprising is Queen Kuldra, an ancient five-headed black dragon known as the Godeater, who rules Ashenfall with her dragon brood. As you journey across the continent, you’ll face her Dragon Lords, uncover the history of this mysterious land, meet its inhabitants, and gather the skills, equipment and knowledge needed for the final confrontation with Kuldra herself. Now, this story serves as your mission structure in a rather open-ended survival approach to the game, giving you something to strive towards without really giving you much sense of urgency about it. Instead, Dragonwilds lets you craft, build, level up, and generally do whatever you want at your own pace.
Right off the bat, I’m going to say that Dragonwilds often feels like a jigsaw puzzle of other games and genres, with RuneScape at its core. And while that sounds like a bad thing, it actually works really well. The gameplay structure follows Valheim very closely, which is ironic considering both titles arrived on Switch 2 around the same time, but each one still manages to feel distinctly different. Dragonwilds’ high-fantasy setting is one of its biggest strengths, but the other is that unmistakable RuneScape DNA running through almost everything you do. There are plenty of skills to level up, from melee, fishing and building to spellcasting, artisanal crafting and plenty more, giving you hours upon hours of things to work towards. You can spend an entire afternoon farming, fishing, fighting, crafting, or simply exploring, depending on what kind of mood you’re in. Each new biome brings its own challenges and has an allocated power level, meaning that once you’ve mastered one area, moving into the next can often feel like you’ve been knocked back down to the bottom of the food chain. I spent around 10 hours in the first area alone, building a modest house and production area in a burnt-out town occupied by goblins. Eventually, this became my central hub.
As I ventured further into Ashenfall, my base of operations expanded with me. I was processing ores into better armour and weapons, expanding my farm to grow food and materials used for crafting, and generally trying to streamline my supply chains so I could spend less time gathering resources and more time adventuring. Honestly, I could have easily spent half of my playtime doing nothing but making my base my own and figuring out the most efficient way to produce everything I needed. There is one small problem with getting too attached to your home, though: goblin warbands can raid it. This meant there were times when I had to put down whatever I was doing and fight on my own doorstep to protect everything I’d worked so hard to build. Rather than feeling like an interruption, though, these attacks helped make my base feel like an actual home that I had something worth protecting.
Taking the fight back to the enemy is exciting too, thanks to a surprisingly enjoyable combat system. Melee combat relies on well-timed parries, ranged combat rewards accurate shots, and spellcasters have a whole arsenal of runes at their disposal. The more you play with a particular skill or combat style, the more it develops, unlocking new abilities that can dramatically change how you approach the game. For example, ranged abilities can eventually allow you to fire off rapid volleys without needing to aim each individual shot, while non-combat skills provide their own benefits through crafting recipes, stat boosts and other useful bonuses. This means that even the skills that don’t directly help you kill something still feed back into the wider progression system.
RuneScape also leans heavily into the fantasy side of things with its magic system, giving you unique spells as you level up that make surviving the Dragonwilds feel genuinely magical. You can uproot multiple vegetable patches at once, throw arcane axes that instantly fell trees, and even obliterate ore-filled boulders with magic to mine their resources instantly. This magic system also feeds into the game’s rune economy, with spells requiring specific types and quantities of runes to cast, and because your different skills and systems constantly feed into one another, there’s almost always another upgrade, ability, resource or recipe waiting just around the corner. It’s a satisfying progression loop that kept me engaged for the duration of my playthrough. That said, it’s not all magic and dragons, because Dragonwilds also has a habit of making itself unnecessarily confusing…
Despite having NPCs that serve as quest givers, I often found the quests convoluted and unclear, with plenty of moments where I was simply fumbling my way through things while wondering what the game actually wanted me to do. A perfect example comes within the first hour, when you’re given a couple of onboarding quests explaining how the game’s skills work before eventually being tasked with hunting some deer. Sounds simple enough, right? Except the game doesn’t really tell you how to craft a bow. It turns out that you first need to pick a particular blue flower, build a spinner, turn that flower into thread, and only then does the bow recipe become available. It’s a small frustration, but there are plenty of moments like this throughout Dragonwilds, where an important step gets buried beneath the game’s many crafting and processing systems. There are also quests that can get lost amongst the busywork of simply surviving, meaning you’ll occasionally find yourself stopping and thinking, “What was that all about again?” I think a better quest-marking system would go a long way here. Even something as simple as clearer quest indicators, or the classic exclamation marks above quest-givers that games like World of Warcraft have used for years, could make a big difference.
It’s certainly not a dealbreaker, but wandering around wondering why your bow isn’t any good, only to discover that you forgot to pick up some nondescript weed and process it through one of the many crafting stations to unlock the upgrades, can be a little frustrating. When the rest of the progression system is doing such a good job of constantly giving you something to work towards, it feels like a shame when the game occasionally gets in its own way. Also, enemy aggro ranges can be absolutely enormous, meaning that once you’ve attracted the attention of something, getting away from it can be much easier said than done. This can make corpse runs particularly brutal, because the same enemies that killed you in the first place can still be waiting nearby when you return to collect your gear, potentially turning one death into several. There are options to make this more forgiving, including custom game settings that allow you to keep your inventory after death, but there’s an important catch: once you’ve started a world, you can’t change its difficulty settings.
When it comes to visuals on Switch 2, RuneScape: Dragonwilds runs at a surprisingly low resolution, and unfortunately, that really takes away from the otherwise well-crafted world around it. The result is a noticeably soft image, and to be honest, it created a pretty terrible first impression. When I first stepped into Ashenfall, I couldn’t help but wonder why the game looked as soft as it did on Switch 2 hardware. But the more I played, the less the graphics personally bothered me. Once I stopped focusing on the resolution, I found myself getting drawn into the world itself, with each biome offering something new and different to discover. From the beautiful grasslands of the early game to the more dangerous environments later on, there’s a good amount of variety here, and that sense of discovery kept pulling me forward throughout my playthrough. Performance is thankfully much more consistent. Dragonwilds is locked to 30 frames per second on Switch 2, and for the most part, it holds that target well. There can be some minor loading hitches, particularly when speeding through the world on a mount, where you’ll occasionally see the game pause for a frame or two as it loads in the environment ahead of you. These moments are fairly negligible, though, and never really interfered with my experience.
For my adventurers looking into accessibility, there are a couple of options that can make your time in Dragonwilds more comfortable, including settings for screen shake and UI scaling. You can also customise your world when starting a new game, allowing you to create a more relaxed playstyle by adjusting some of the game’s survival settings to better suit your needs. As always, I recommend further research to find out if RuneScape: Dragonwilds suits your accessibility needs. At just under $44 AUD, despite the soft graphics, RuneScape: Dragonwilds is a great time on Switch 2. It’s currently only available digitally, with developer Jagex unable to commit to a physical launch at the present time.
RuneScape: Dragonwilds has been a really interesting game to review for me. On paper, there are elements that should take a bit away from the experience, but in practice, I spent nights staying up until 2 am, just glued to my screen, trying to get some material for a Masterwork Shield or maximising my crops and compost. I haven’t felt this sort of draw since when I first played World of Warcraft, calculating how much game time I could squeeze in and still get decent sleep before starting work the next day. Sure, the visuals on Switch 2 will be the biggest hurdle for most gamers, but for those who think beauty is only skin deep, there’s a massive survival RPG that might not do a lot of things new, but it does them all well.
So, What’s it Like? RuneScape Dragonwilds is like Valheim, but with RuneScape at its core.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.
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