Burn, Baby, Burn: Hungry Dragon Beginner’s Guide

We’ve all heard fairy tales about dragons ravaging the lands, eating sheep and maidens, and generally wreaking havoc. Most games put you in the shoes of the valiant knights who stand up against the dragons.

In Hungry Dragon, you get to be the dragon.

Fly around eating, exploring, and setting fire to just about everything in this new game by Ubisoft.

Hungry Dragon doesn’t hold your hand — aside from a few tips and a brief tutorial, it’s mostly up to the player to figure things out. And there are plenty of things to find and discover! Read on to get the scoop on how to effectively play this game in our Hungry Dragon beginner’s guide!

The Basics: How to Stay Alive in Hungry Dragon

There’s one very important method to staying alive in Hungry Dragon: Eat constantly.

From the moment you begin a stage, your life is slowly draining. Some creatures and obstacles you meet along your travels will also take a chunk out of your health. But every time you eat something, your health increases, usually by a minuscule amount.

You can eat practically anything that moves. Take out entire flocks of birds; munch on some sheep; snap fellow dragons in half. Some munchies require a certain-sized dragon. These are pretty easy to spot since they’re physically bigger.

The more you eat, the more your health refills. But let your health drop, and you’ll reach the critical and then starving status. Reach 0 and the stage is over.

All this means is that as long as you’re eating and avoiding obstacles and painful encounters (and use the right pets and costumes for you, but more on that later), you can stretch one stage to last a pretty long time — enough to really explore it.

Burn Everything: How to Get Fire Rush Faster

As you eat, you fill up your “Fire Rush” meter. Reach the top and you’ll emit a fiery dragon breath that turns everything you come into contact with into a crisp. As a nice bonus, every enemy is turned into a golden enemy when you’re in Fire Rush mode, so you refill your feeding meter and fill your coin-purse at the same time.

Eight Fire Rushes in, you get to use the “Mega Fire Rush” which prolongs your fire with a larger, more awesome blue flame of death. It’ll also burn every enemy regardless of size, something regular Fire Rush doesn’t do. The amount of Fire Rushes you’ve done is retained from run to run, so keep an eye on the little symbols under the Fire Rush meter to see how close you are.

Eat chilies and fire coins (found around the world) to get here faster, and keep your combo rate up. The Fire Rush increases according to the points you earn, and you earn more points thanks to the combo. All this means is that you should be eating one thing after another all the time — something we recommend you do anyway to stay alive. It’s a win-win!

A Vast World: Exploration in Hungry Dragon

When you first start playing, you might be surprised that you keep coming back to the same map for each stage. But, you quickly discover just how large this map is!

Your boundaries are marked by red x’s on the map (accessible in the upper right-hand corner when you’re playing). These are obstacles your puny little dragon can’t break through until you get a bigger one.

But even with these limitations, the map is pretty huge, and thoroughly exploring it is a vital part of the game. The map is divided into various themed areas, like a waterfall, a goblin city, a cemetery, and much more.

Here are just some of the things you’ll find through exploration:

• Treasure chests – These give you money. Five chests are randomly found throughout the world and new ones spawn every day.
• Eggs – Gives you new pets. You can get up to one egg per run.
• HUNGRY Letters – Find them all in one run and you’ll attain invincibility and maximum eating power!… For 10 seconds.
• Dragon Food – From goblins and witches to sheep and horses — just remember you are what you eat. Some snacks inflict status effects like confused flying if you eat the drunkard in the human village.
• Easter Eggs – We’ve found some Mario question blocks, a message in the sky, and reportedly the Tardis makes an appearance. Keep your eyes peeled!

Arm Yourself: Hungry Dragon Pets and Costumes

Pets and costumes help you out on your quests by providing power-ups like increasing the amount of money you receive, reducing poison damage, granting an extra life per run, and many similar buffs and bonuses.

You unlock costumes by leveling your dragon. Some costumes cost gold while others cost gems. This aspect is fairly self-explanatory, so we won’t dwell on it.

Pets are a bit more involved. Every dragon can equip a certain number of pets — generally, the bigger the dragon, the more pets you can attach to it. There are different types of pets at various levels of rarity and they all come from eggs.

Eggs come in three varieties:

• Standard Eggs – These contain common pets and can be found on the map during a run (though you can only get one pet per run). These require an incubation period. You can skip the first waiting period for free, but after that, it takes gems.
• Golden Eggs – These contain “special pets” — get these by collecting enough golden egg fragments, which you receive every time you get a pet that you already have from a standard egg. You can also occasionally snag a golden egg from a special event.
• Premium Eggs – Special eggs that can be bought for real money, and they need no incubation time.

The key to a good run is to choose the right combination of pets for you. All the more reason to explore the map on every run and find those eggs!

Hungry Dragon Combat Tips

While the “combat” in this game mostly consists of bitting down on things, there are a few things to remember when you’re flying around causing mayhem.

We mentioned already that the different sized prey needs different size dragons to eat.

In addition to that, many things you encounter can hurt you.

You’ll discover most of these on your own, but some things to watch out for in particular are:

• Mines – They’re easy to run into and they take out a chunk of health. Try to stay aware of your surroundings to avoid them!
• Giant Trolls – Boost between their legs or above them to avoid a devastating blow from their club. 
• Kamikaze Goblins – They’re fast and they hurt. Get them before they get you: Ignore other enemies if you see these guys and rush straight at them first. 
• Other Dragons – These love to chomp down on the tails of longer dragons. If you see one going for you, circle around yourself (about-face!) and bite back.

There are many other creatures that can hurt you — explore everything!

More Hungry Dragon Tips

Now that you know the basics, here are a few more tips to help you rise to the top in Hungry Dragon!

• Complete missions for extra gold – Missions refresh every few hours, and you can check what quests are currently active at any point during your run by hitting the pause button.
• Buy gems for perks – As with many mobile games, you can spend real money on gems (or collect them slowly throughout the game). These gems can be used to refresh missions faster, skip egg incubation periods, reveal hidden items on the map, purchase special costumes, and more.
• Not everything falls in one hit – Some things require more than one hit to eat.
• Not everything is safe to eat – Items surrounded by red will hurt instead of healing you, while other things inflict effects like the drunkard we mentioned earlier, poison, and other unfortunate side-effects.
• The sky is not the limit – you can boost above the cloud-line at the top and below the water line on the bottom. To get really high, time your outer-space exploration with a Fire Rush — during the rush, you have unlimited boost. You can also repeatedly wait a couple of seconds after your boost runs out then boost upward again to slowly climb higher. This isn’t very efficient but it does get you a bit higher each time — perfect if you’re trying to get to something just out of your reach.
• Compete in tournaments – Once the option is available, try your hand in the tournaments. These pit you against other players by giving you a random dragon and pet combination. Rank high in the leaderboard for bigger rewards!
• Try all the dragons – Besides the overall size of each dragon, the shape also affects the way you play. For instance, Sparky is a super-long dragon that was constantly getting bitten on his tail, but he was also easier to maneuver than the other “Small” rank dragon.
• Work together to complete community quests – In addition to personal missions, there are massive collaborative quests. Help achieve the goal and everyone gets rewarded!
• Eat groups in one gulp – Chomp down on entire flocks of birds at one time for a score boost.
• Catch the flying pig – Sometimes you’ll find a cute winged pig flying around. If you can get your jaws on him, you get a free gem!
• Explore the map for secret areas – Follow drafts, boost around land under the water, go through gates above the clouds, and be generally on the lookout for anything that looks suspicious.
• Take pictures! – This won’t help you in-game, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a dragon hanging out in your room, Hungry Dragon has an AR mode for taking pictures! Try it out for some silly fun.

Remember: explore, discover, and have fun with this great little game from Ubisoft!

And stay tuned for more Hungry Dragon news from GameSkinny!