RuneScape Dragonwilds review: Early access but still feature-rich

Dragonwilds shares much of its DNA with Jagex’s RuneScape MMOs, but that’s not what makes it impressive.

Survival games, frequently deployed in Early Access, often fail to realize their full potential. Last Oasis and Rust Legacy, the latter of which has only been kept alive by way of a dedicated fan community, remain unfinished works.

Dragonwilds follows that very same delivery model, but Jagex has no intention of letting sleeping dogs lie. Barring some omissions, what’s available from day one feels like a complete experience bursting with potential for future expansion.

RuneScape Dragonwilds screenshots

What is RuneScape Dragonwilds about?

Dragonwilds is a survival game spinoff of Jagex’s MMOs, RuneScape 3 and Old School RuneScape, aiming to make the jump from Early Access to full release in 2026. While all three exist in the same universe, this new game takes place on a landmass never-before-seen in RuneScape games.

Arriving on the island of Ashenfall with little more than the clothes on your back, you’re tasked with making a rendezvous with members of an expedition crew preceding yours.

After it becomes quickly apparent that this Brave New World isn’t exactly hospitable to humans, you’re quickly forced into scavenging for resources to stave off thirst and starvation.

Skills – all of which riff on those found in Dragonwilds’ MMO siblings – are core to progression, granting access to increasingly potent survival magic spells and incrementally better gear to make life easier.

Welcome to Ashenfall

Despite its status as an Early Access experience, Ashenfall, your character’s new Gielinorian home, doesn’t feel like a work-in-progress playground.

The island’s five biomes – all sporting distinct fantasy set dressing – house unique resources, enemies, and secrets to both distract you and prepare you for the ultimate goal of taking down Velgar, a dragon whose sole purpose is to be an insufferable environmental hazard.

Velgar isn’t the only threat you’ll have to contend with, either. Thirst, hunger, and stamina, all staples of the genre, must be managed while contending with other dangers. Alone, they’re manageable, but when combined, the balance teeters more toward frustrating than challenging. 

With little warning, either Velgar or bands of roaming Goblins will take it upon themselves to hunt you down or specifically target your base. The first handful of times, they’re excellent world-building events. Once the novelty wears off, and it will, they become pointless obstacles.

Often, it was easier to let the aggressor kill me on the spot to despawn the event, retrieve my dropped items, and return to renovating my work-in-progress home with materials gathered from my latest expedition North into the Fractured Plains.

There’s no place like home

Before its release, Dragonwilds Executive Producer Jesse America told me that Jagex had made a concerted effort to implement a building system that would be both accessible and appeal to players who don’t necessarily have any interest in the survival game staple.

From the perspective of someone from the latter camp, Jagex succeeded. For Early Access, base-building – entirely encompassed by Dragonwilds’ Construction skill – feels incredibly robust.

Grid snapping and transparency options are a godsend for a self-professed architectural dummy, eliminating the frustration of investing several minutes attempting to get a corner roof to sit flush just right.

Did my humble, extremely box-like home inevitably turn into an industrial factory for processing Dragonwilds’ massive stores of natural resources I spent hours gathering? You bet, and I loved every second of it.

Magical gathering

Dragonwilds’ most innovative feature is how it handles Magic. While the arcane can be wielded in combat, its most important role is as a quality-of-life tool.

Cutting trees and mining mineral deposits, so often chores in other survival titles, can be augmented with spell unlocks tied to their respective skill, almost turning each into a pseudo-minigame. 

Eyeing up a nearby forest to see how many in a line I could find to fell in a single cast of Axtral Projection was a recurring personal favorite that turned resource gathering into its own metagame of optimization.

Some of these spells are designed to augment your offensive capabilities. Their scope is hamstrung by combat’s unfinished nature, however, as Ranged and Magic exist in an unfinished state.

If both receive enchantments and augments in much the same way Attack (essentially Dragonwilds’ melee skill) does down the line, combat would at least benefit from greater variety that it currently lacks.

Verdict

Dragonwilds’ core gameplay doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it ticks all the boxes of what makes survival games so addictive while bringing fresh ideas to the table that work wonders in minimizing genre fatigue.

Jagex’s roadmap promises core updates to every facet of the game, and with a foundation as solid as this, there’s every chance it could become a leader among its peers.

The biggest issue, by a country mile, is an overreliance on unfun, semi-scripted events that, right now, only serve to cause frustration.

Jagex’s mission to be as receptive as possible to community feedback will undoubtedly help to remedy such foibles and place it in a prime position to collaboratively expand Ashenfall beyond its current limits.

As an Early Access game, our Dragonwilds review will be updated over time to reflect future updates and improvements.