I wanted to like this book. I really, really, really did. The fluff is great, and the 'premise' of the archetypes and drakes are nice.
But.
Both the archetypes, and the drake companions themselves, have some of the worst balancing I have seen in pathfinder. An example of this is the druid, who replaces an animal companion with a drake companion. The drake is actually weaker then alot of normal animal companion choices, and to take the archetype actually removes six of his core abilities just for the drake part of the archetype, never mind the additional abilities changed for the other parts of the archetype.
I really hope at some point paizo revisits the idea of these drake archetypes and companions and does a tremendous re-balancing, as many of these archetypes feel almost unplayable with how bad they can gimp a character.
