Dragon Commander - Preview @ Hooked Gamers

Hooked Gamers looks at Dragon Commander after a viewing at Gamescom:

Actual battles for dominance over an area can be settled by simply clicking the auto-resolve button and letting the AI calculate the outcome, but it’s more fun to do it yourself. Aerial combat involves swarms of aircraft duking it out in the skies. Aircraft come in three variations: slow but heavy hitting, small but highly maneuverable and something in between the two. Flying at higher altitudes makes your units slower but more lethal, while flying lower will make them faster but do less damage. In concept, that’s very straight forward, but the game does have some surprises up its sleeve.

The first of these involves cards. You start a battle with a stack of cards that can be used to award special skills and attributes to your squadrons to give them an edge in combat. The other is that jet-pack-powered dragon that I mentioned earlier. While the battle is raging and your opponent may think he has you in his sights, you can join the battlefield as the dragon and rain down on his parade with bolts of fire. The dragon is fast and agile and often able to get behind the enemy lines without too much trouble. He is not invulnerable though, and should you be slain you have to wait a while before you can get back in, or rejoin almost instantly at the expense of a lot of gold.