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Absolute waste

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I'd love to say that the makers of this game took their time creating and rendering an impressive array of complex and interesting monsters to populate a challenging and engaging story filled with exciting adventures. I know that such can be done, because several other games have managed to do just that in the past few years, so why "Dawn of Magic" failed to live up to the ordinary standards of the modern `Hack-`n'-Slash' RPG is beyond explanation.

The game commits virtually every cardinal sin in terms of its gameplay value. For an adventure in which your brave hero battles hordes of monsters, seizes treasures, and boldly saves the day, the developers evidently thought that `excitement' was much overrated. Battles are not just a largely mundane series of madly clicking on enemies which flit around the battlefield in an unorganized fashion, they are also maddeningly repetitive - so repetitive that not infrequently did I become so bored that I saved the game and closed it, mid-battle. Treasures are not only sometimes bizarre, but frequently ill-conceived (for instance, my character received as an early reward a magical weapon - which unfortunately happened to be an umbrella).

Enemy monsters themselves are well-rendered, three-dimensionally. It's truly a pity that nobody took the time to ensure that their models weren't quite so ridiculous-looking (goblins, anyone?). Monsters that aren't quite so ridiculous looking are universally annoying to deal with. Many maps have an abundance of `fire beetles,' which fall over and play dead after taking a single hit with a decent-damage spell. During this period, they cannot take damage, leaving the hero to stand idly by and wait until they decide to upright themselves so that he can finish the battle and move on.

Rather than having full life-bars that decrease when attacked, enemies have a damage bar (which, of course, isn't labeled as such) which fills as they take damage. For reasons still unclear, the developers opted to make the bar fill from zero damage on the right to dead on the left end of the bar.

Adding a bit of flavor to the `annoying enemies' list is an unusual addition to the standard `Hack-`n'-`Slash' RPG genre game: looters. Looters are special enemies who will trail along behind you and rush into the battle to pick up loot that's dropped from enemy monsters before you can get to it. If you try to kill them, they'll surround themselves with magical shields, teleport just out of spell-range, or run directly into packs of monsters (who unnaturally enough, don't seem at all interested in attacking the looter who's come into their midst). Yes, that's right - read it again. The fine developers of "Dawn of Magic" were sitting around a conference table one afternoon when a lone voice of reason spoke up... "You know what a good single player RPG needs, that to date only MMORPG's have? Ninja-looters." Killing the looters can usually only be accomplished by chasing them into the corners of the zones, or by waiting until the rest of the zone has been cleared of all enemies.

Camera control is a further aggravation. At no time can a player see what is in front of him more than a short distance unless the camera is zoomed in to it's maximum, at which point, the player (which does not become transparent) blocks much of the view.

Frequently, the game's voice-acting leaves much to be desired, and the dialogue is strangely abrupt, ill-translated, and confusingly enough, frequently wrong. Wrong? Yes, that's right, if you trust what comes out of your speakers, you will find yourself frequently at a loss to figure out what to do. During the tutorial (a tutorial so riddled with errors that a map behind one of the NPC's is unmistakably a map of Earth, and in which the NPC training you calmly tells you to break open containers whenever you find them - an act which will get you arrested in town), the voice-actor informs you that by pressing the `tab' key, the game map can be displayed in various forms. Unfortunately, the text on-screen reveals that a different key entirely controls the mini-map.

Finally, just in case the shoddy combat system, aggravating enemies, terrible dialogue, and continuity errors don't bother you, the developers apparently decided that quests and zone-crossing movement should be as counter-intuitive as possible. Early in the game, a quest given by an NPC in the main town tells you to find a person who is "north of a miner's village." After traveling to the miner's village East of the main town, the miners again tell you that the person you are searching for is north of their village. Curiously, the object of your quest is not only not north of the miner's village (it is in fact due west of the miner's village in a completely different zone that is WEST of the main town), but to get to the zone in which the object of your quest is located, you must use a zone-teleporter which is due South of the miner's village. As a further example, the main town for the first part of the game contains zone-teleporters which will take you to the countryside to the South and East of the city. In keeping with the counter-intuitive theme of the game, the zone-teleporter to the `south outlands' is at the north end of the city, and the teleporter to the `east outlands' is on the west end of the city.

Frankly, when I spend thirty dollars on a game, I expect the game to be well-made, generally free from glaring errors, and something worthy to come out under the auspices of a major gaming label. "Dawn of Magic" fails to live up to my expectations in virtually every way possible - and that's pretty hard to do.

LIKE A GORGEOUS GIFT BOX CONTAINING ...PLAIN TUBE SHOCKS.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 18
Date: December 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the most beautiful hack 'n' slash cRPGs to ever get loaded onto my computer. Unfortunately, eye-candies rarely float on their looks alone. Its vapidness, lack of originality and poor gameplay made me uninstall it within a few hours...

This is a game that, obviously, was built by check-marking a list of cRPG features. There are all there and yet the aftertaste is one of total blandness. Here is the extent of the innovation applied: Mullog is a villainous Boss. Now, try to read it backwards...Precious, isn't it?

One can choose his alignment and school of magic specializations - and those choices will affect the character's appearance (not otherwise customizable). No paladins or rogues or barbarians to chose from. Instead, a set of unusual characters are available: the Fat Friar, the Baker's Wife, the Awkward Scholar and the Weird Gypsy, each with its unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses that affect their beginning attributes. I did not care for the three difficulty levels that have to be completed in sequence - but, to be fair, this an annoying feature of most hack 'n' slash games. Someone, please, put a stop to this...

A nice touch in fights is the ability to combine the primary and secondary spells into a "new" magic attack. For instance, a radioactivity spell combined with a fire attack will result in a radioactive fireball (with damage added from both). On the other hand, having to continuously click on the opponents to keep attacking them gets really boring; fast.

As I have already mentioned, graphically this game is GORGEOUS! Environments, characters and NPCs as well as spells are very well designed and rendered. Having said this, one cannot fail to notice the limitations of the graphics engine: the line of sight is way short as if the engine is too weak to handle longer distances.

The voice acting is not atrocious but it is really bad. The same voice-actors got recycled for numerous different roles and the subtitles do not...always correspond to the spoken words.
The developer (DEEP-SILVER) did not spare any expense when it came to design artists. Too bad this left them with no resources for most of the other departments...

Only for the hack 'n' slash addicted and then, only if under severe withdrawal symptoms...

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