Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Lee Evans

Thank goodness for the summer lull.

That's the kind of thing I would say if I was crazy, but I'm not.  I hate the summer lull.  There's nothing to play, there's no good games around and I don't like the sun anyway on account of it being too hot and yellow.  It can sometimes leave you scraping the bottom of the barrel of releases in an attempt to find anything at all to play.

I decided to take a flyer on Dawn of Discovery, one of those games that looks like a cheap second-rate crap game, after having a half-hearted interest in it when I heard about it.  I didn't hear any buzz about it either positive or negative, which I assumed wasn't good.  I decided to go for it anyway.  Here's the good news:  It's really really good, especially for a breezy summer game.  You might even decide to play it outside where you can get sun.  It's that good.

Dawn of Discovery harkens back to the city builders that used to populate the PC gaming scene in the mid-90's.  It's funny, but when the DS came out, everyone right away thought of real-time strategy games as being perfect for the system.  A couple came and went, but city builders handle much, much better that a typical RTS might on the DS. Like a lot of city builders, it gets a little complex toward the middle, but it's still worth it.

I suppose I should give you more details other than "Buy this game," so here goes.  It's 1404, and the king has tasked his two sons to fix what ails the kingdom.  They need resources in a bad way, and you and your hotheaded brother go in search of wheat, hemp, and tax money while fighting off a rival kingdom.  Along the way, you'll need to manage your various cities, pay off tributes to the king and fend off your rivals.

The first great thing about Dawn of Discovery is that they gave it a strong sense of personality.  You don't just get talked to by nebulous text, but they make actual characters with their own motivations.  For instance, one of your main advisers gets seasick so he doesn't like to travel on boats.  Does it matter?  No, but it helps to flesh out the character and attach yourself to them in a way that a lot of developers fail to do.  It makes you actually care about the story, which is given through various cutscenes and conversation pieces that your advisers fill you in on.

Another great thing about Dawn of Discovery are the clean, bright and crisp graphics.  They mixed 2-D sprites with some really light 3-D for the various units.  You can see people walking around, ferry goods from one location to another, and there are a lot of little details that make the game really come to life. There are times where some things look similar to each other, like the buildings for rat catchers and fire protection. Sometimes you can't really tell at a glance which one is which.  Still, all you have to do is tap on the building and get an idea for what it is.

That brings us to the controls.  Most everything is handled with the stylus.  A tap on a building will bring up the pertinent information about what's currently going on with it.  If you hold the stylus down, it'll bring up a help screen explaining what you're clicking on.  That's a good thing, since there are times when an icon doesn't tell the whole story.  For instance, a hammer with a little yellow explosion means "destroy," which can take down a valuable building that you just put up.  In cases like that, it's great to always be able to ask what the icon means before you end up wasting valuable resources.

The music and sound is all fantastic as well.  The various tracks are light and breezy and they keep out of your way.  They'll start up, play themselves, and then go back to the ambient sounds of the world for a while.  The voice acting is actually surprisingly good.  The people who made this game put a lot of love into the sound, and it shows.

Of course, Dawn of Discovery is by no means perfect.  It suffers from a few issues that are inherent in the genre.  For instance, the game gets much more complex as it goes along.  At first you'll merely have to set up fire protection and a chapel for your subjects.  After a while you'll have to set up a church, a bathhouse, a rat catcher, soldier's quarters, provide them with pottery, spices, meat, clothing and bread AND make sure their taxes aren't making them upset.  To that end, your advisers will notify you if something's going wrong, and if there's an emergency an icon will appear in the bottom left hand corner of the screen so you can go straight to the issue.  It gets tiring trying to juggle so many balls in the air at once, but Dawn of Discovery walks you through it really carefully so that you never feel overwhelmed.

I have another complaint:  Sometimes your advisers aren't very helpful.  For instance, I built clay facilities on one of my islands and put a pottery workshop next to them.  I found myself collecting copious amounts of clay, but none of it ever made it to the workshop.  It all ended up going to my warehouse and never got from there to potter, who, whenever I clicked on his building was spinning himself around on his pottery wheel.  My advisers told me that product wasn't getting to the pottery shop to make the pots, but there were roads leading to it and everything.  Finally, I tore down all my shops and rearranged everything and lo and behold, materials were finally reaching the shop.  However, no pottery ever came out of the building.  Not once did they finish a clay pot.  I waited for five minutes and nothing ever emerged.  No explanation was given.  I'd click on the building and it would say that they were working diligently, but I never saw any real tangible product.  Once again, no one ever explained why this was happening, and I was left to start the chapter over to see if I could fix the issue.

Also, combat is somewhat simplistic. You merely build soldier's quarters, build warships, send the warships over to an island where they establish a base and fight it out in order to take over the island. There's not a ton of strategy involved, but that didn't bother me. The meat of Dawn of Discovery is the city-building, not the combat, so it didn't bother me.

However, those just a couple of tiny issues during my entire playtime with a game that barely got any press, no reviews, and is being passed unnoticed by the gaming public at large.  There's a fine line between being a reviewer and an evangelist, but I'm going to cross it.  Look, people, this is what the DS works great for.  If you like strategy at all and you need a game to get you through the long hot summer nights, get Dawn of Discovery.

Gaming Trend Score

88

1. Graphics: 80
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 90
5. Value/Replay: 95
6. OVERALL:88