Dawn of Discovery
Review
Prepare to embark upon a remarkable voyage
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on NDS
Taking a hold of The New World
The game’s user interface is nothing short of impressive. My initial reaction was one of shock: Was I really expected to be able to control such a large empire as the big map led me to believe? As it turns out, the game did expect me to do just that. With the excellent tools that it offers, it is certainly not too much to ask. Dawn of Discovery lets you zoom in when you are placing new buildings, zoom out to get a complete overview of your island. You can quickly jump between islands and ships under your control and zoom out to a sea-chart type map that allows you to easily order your ships to other islands or zoom in on a particular island with two taps on the screen.
No matter what you do, every interaction with the interface will result in a smooth and lag-less experience. When you take the high quality of the game’s graphics into consideration, the well-oiled interaction is no small feat!
Sharp edge
Dawn of Discovery’s islands are smaller than its big brothers found on the PC. While this does motivate players to quickly gain control over other islands, it also means that you will soon be engaged in one war or another. This is where the game exposes the un-ticked box. I’ll explain.
To wage war against other islands you will naturally build up a fleet and an army. The rather low fleet cap prevents you from creating large fleets. To stage an attack on an island, you will first have to establish beachheads. This converts your ship, causing it to lose its ability to ever set sail again. This means that you can’t return to pick up more troops and the additional time you need to build a new fleet and mount a second attack gives your enemy time to build up its forces. Obviously this makes it even harder to conquer the island.
Being stuck with the islands that you gained by occupying them quicker than the competition grows old rather fast. I am sure every player will keep on trying to conquer enemy islands until successful, and eventually you will. I really do think that this side of the game is a bit too hard and find it strange that Ubisoft didn’t catch this during play testing as it puts a small blemish on an otherwise stellar game.
On the positive side, troops do not have to be trained and will automatically appear in your barracks as long as they have room and the unit cap has not been reached. With a few quick flicks of the stylus you can send troops out to defend important buildings or board ships that are getting ready to attack the enemy.
Impressive!
Many publishers opt for Turn-Based adaptations of their Real-Time strategy franchises when going handheld. In most cases, this is a good choice as successfully implementing Real-Time gameplay on vast maps for handhelds is incredibly difficult. With Dawn of Discovery for the DS, Ubisoft chose to remain true to the Real-Time format and gets away with this incredibly well. One to buy!
9.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
