Dragoon's Charge

Dragoon’s Charge
I wouldn’t really call this a story so much as a sort of cool action scene of death and destruction.

It starts off right into the action, which is not inherently bad, but it would have been nice to have had a bit of context given to me. I kept waiting for it to come later, but it never did. All I know is that I was a dragoon, I had been ambushed, and I had been shot.
I did not know why I was fighting or who I was fighting or what sort of world this was.
There was not really any story beyond either dying, killing a bunch of dudes, or killing a bunch of dudes before dying.
It felt more like a portion of a story than a complete story.

There were some cool bits. I liked the epic moment of charging the enemy while my intestines were falling out.
Of course, Derp added some voided bowels jokes as well, because of course Derp did.

The story also had no rejoining of branches, if you exclude the epilogues which were able to be reached by multiple ways. That is very nice to see in a story.

There were some mechanical errors, some of which were pretty bad. I would recommend the author reread his story and look for what I mean, and if he cannot find them, he should skim a grammar primer.
Also, there were a few awkward sentences that could have done with the recipient of an action being made clear.

With some polishing of the grammar, this would have made for a very nice battle scene in a larger work, but as it is it seemed too incomplete.

P.S. DAMMIT, Derp! I only find out you unpublished this AFTER I read and reviewed it!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw the word count, but this was a nice action story and an entertaining way to spend a few minutes. My major nitpicks are the lack of polish; lots of punctuation issues and misspellings which I'm being less lenient towards than I'd normally be for a story done on a time limit, given this was published a day early and is pretty short.

I see Gower already covered this, but...

You pull the carbine out of it's holster on your horse and slap it's flank

...you know for the first time I'm REALLY glad End banned you from the Discord or else upon encountering this sentence I'd have been tempted to tab over and do it myself. It's/its burns usssssss. And it just keeps happening!

I had fun though, and either I'm really good at battle tactics or you made the right choices pretty intuitive, because I wound up with the 'died laughing' ending and then the 'didn't die at all' one right after that before clicking around for the others. I didn't go for the horse originally though because it seemed impractical with the injury...and that's my other complaint. This guy is running around being an action hero and only a couple of times is the pain from having just been shot in the stomach even mentioned, and it doesn't affect his ability to do all this heavily physical stuff at all.

Otherwise the writing of the action scenes all read pretty smoothly, I didn't run into any of the pacing and flow issues that trip up so many authors.

I do hope you take this down and clean it up though, it's the perfect story to point to for an example of 'try writing something with a smaller scale' I'm always giving those noobs who want to do EPICS but don't yet understand how to approach breaking their ideas down into individual scenes. Simply surviving (or not) an event like the one depicted here can make for a good story in its own right.

As a short story this is excellent. It gives a grisly picture of hand-to-hand and courage without going over the top. [spoiler]


I was a little surprised that there was a way to survive, since I started out with a gut shot that was meant to kill me and charged them all from the flank without shooting first. But that's just the chaos of battle I suppose.

This game should be reworked and polished (oh my god, it's/its) because it is a really original and cool idea. It has so much potential, and even though there's not much of it, the story managed to create interest right from the start.

It didn't try to be epic, it tried to create suspense and conflict and terror, and even some humor, and it succeeded admirable there. If this game had polished its (ITS) prose more, a bit longer and had more choices, I think it could have been a small masterpiece. I think it can get there.

I really liked this story. Sort of a different take on the idea of a "lone hero".

So basically, we're nobody special in this story. We're a dragoon, a sort of mounted infantry, and we managed to find our self in the middle of an ambush. After getting shot in the gut and realizing we probably aren't going to make it we decide to take as many of the enemy down with us as we can. There are numerous ways we've been given the option to do this. We can fight on foot, fight on horse, shoot, stab, slice, or just straight up charge the enemy like a vengeful revenant. It was a lot of fun going through all the options and they were all unique and showed good understanding of this type of combat.

There are numerous endings to this story. The majority of them have you dying a heroes death. Some of them are quite touching. Some are almost humorous. But all were well written. However, you can in fact survive this story. You miraculously wind up getting patched up by the surgeon and you even get a promotion. Which means you get to try to keep a bunch of teenagers from shooting themselves by accident. Judging from my own experiences in the military, DerPrussen is quite correct in assuming that commanding soldiers is much like babysitting a bunch of rowdy kids with guns. So I had a laugh at that ending.

There were a few spelling and grammar mistakes here and there, but nothing a bit more proofreading couldn't solve. And it really doesn't take away from the story or become very distracting but I just thought I'd mention it.

Great work DerPrussen. I hope to see more from you in the future.

To say this story starts off fast-paced would be an understatement. Right away, you’re thrust into the madness of warfare. The descriptions and writing quality are at a level where the story is engaging and thrilling.

The premise itself is simple, although it’s dependent upon the writer which seems like a no-brainer statement, but I can imagine a noob attempting this same story and failing miserably. I think the tricky part about writing war scenes is not making it repetitive and not going over the top. Dragoon’s Charge is a short thrill, but a thrill nonetheless.

Man! My character is really good with a saber! It seems like every "winning" ending involved me charging to my almost certain death to hack away at my enemies and yet somehow managing to survive in the end. Even stranger, when I tried to use a gun, I almost always wound up dead. I kept wondering whether my character was just especially good with a saber, or if it's just easier to fight that way rather than with a musket. I don't claim to know anything about battle tactics, so I have no idea. Until today, I didn't even know the Dragoons existed in real life, (but thanks to google, I now know better). So hey, I learned something new today.

Anyways, I thought the first few choices were really well done. (Uh, spoilers beyond this point, by the way. This is your final warning). I tried almost all of the branches and found that going in with the saber on the horse resulted in a win, whereas choosing the exact same option without the horse killed me. It was a pleasant surprise, because for a moment I'd thought I was going to get the exact same result as before, but instead found something new.

This butterfly-effect decision has a bit of a downside though. The branch where I chose the horse wasn't all that fleshed out. There's only one more choice after that, one ends in a win, the other, death. The choice to not get on the horse, however, leads to a multitude of other decisions, all of which effect the outcome of the battle. I rather enjoyed exploring all the different paths I could take, but it would've been nice to have had the same experience with both branches. (I totally understand why it happened though. I felt pretty rushed going into this contest too).

One last random thing. I really liked the character of Church, he seemed really witty, even though he didn't appear much throughout the story. That's all! Best of luck in the contest!

Talk about diving right into the action! It can hardly be considered a "spoiler" to say you get shot in this story -- because that's explained to you in the opening lines. Your unit has been ambushed, you've taken a hit in your gut, and you assess your wound to be fatal. Knowing that you're going to die, it's just a matter of choosing how the process unfolds.

This is certainly an interesting interpretation of the "lone hero" contest theme. The protagonist doesn't really have time to consider the alternatives to his actions; his comrades are getting shot at, and realizing he has nothing to lose he wastes no time taking action.

Likewise, @DerPrussen wastes no time getting the action started. There literally is no set-up or introduction to this story. There are advantages and risks to doing this. If the essence of your story is that final moment of going out in a blaze of glory, then we don't necessarily need to bog that down with a gratuitous character study.

On the other hand, the reader feels handicapped throughout the story. Without a set-up for the scene, I felt like I was running to catch up to what was happening on the page. I did not have a feel for the layout of the ambush; I gathered as I read through all of the endings that there was a road, some trees, and a small ridge of some kind. And since I have no personal knowledge of the weapons being used, I really had no preference as to which one I reloaded. So in certain aspects, some additional details could have helped enhance that you-are-there sense.

If I recall correctly from the Forum, the author is not a native English speaker, so I'll give a pass on spelling and grammar; @DerPrussen wrote a better story in English than I ever could in, say, German.

Actually, while to me the story was a tad thin, I think quite a few readers on this site might genuinely enjoy this story, since it is so straight and to the point.