Related Design has had a very good run with its popular Anno series and the new one called Dawn of Discovery(for North America) seems like a good follow up.There is a demo available now and this my impression of the demo.
The demo is a time limited demo that has an hour limit for two scenarios(in total, you can play 2 hours of the demo). First off, the game looks gorgeous. It’s art is cartoony in a way, but the look is soft and pleasing to the eye. The game performs well enough while looking this good. I mean performance isn’t such a critical issue in city building games anyway.
The main campaign features a scenario like story based mission which starts with nicely drawn animated art. Each mission has new objectives and introduces new characters that demand or plead for your help. They tend to get pretty irritating as they demand for specific goods for their cause. In the demo, you are overloaded with quests to fulfil(in the second level) as you meet 2 new characters and your king calls a crusade on the orient(a middle eastern equivalent faction in the game).
The characters are memorable such as the sly and obnoxious Guy Forcas and Marie D’Artos which is the games equivalent of Jeanne D'Arc. Be prepared to do lots of favours for them in the campaign. While the emphasis on specific objectives is a good way of adding a progression in a campaign, the strength of games like this is the sand box game.
I feel it shares a lot of similarities with Impression games city building games such as the Caesar series, Zeus and Pharaoh but the campaign is less fun compared those games. But the sand box level is awesome as you don’t have to listen to endless whining by story characters.
Dawn of Discovery is similar to Impression type city building games in the way you need different production buildings to make the raw materials and plan the entire production line for it. It doesn’t use walkers, buildings instead can receive materials or transport goods if connected to a road. All building have a zone of influence in which it affects its environment like logging huts affect the tree around the radius etc.
The heart of all towns is the marketplace. The marketplace in Dawn of Victory doesn’t represent a trade center that much but it creates the zone in which you can build all buildings in. Placement of the marketplace is very important as a badly placed marketplace will affect your future plans of adding different industries.
Dawn of Discovery(Anno 1404) introduces a new culture for the first time in the series. The orient, the games equivalent of a middle eastern is a great place to trade your goods at as they pay good price for some goods. It adds diversity to the game as the previous games has always had settlements with the same aesthetics(European architecture).
Overall, I was impressed with this demo. Dawn of Discovery seems to be a good city building game as well as a light trading game with many improvements to the user interface and mechanics that make this one the best in the series.
Download the demo here
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