Dawn? I'll sleep in.
"Well, since we don't know what the Absolute is, there is no need to bother finding it out." Well said, Arthur Measely, magic shop owner whose name is totally not a Harry Potter reference. No need to bother. Dawn of Magic is a click-to-move fantasy RPG in the vein of Diablo. While aspiring to be "classic," this iteration of the formula is feeling kind of tired.
The Absolute is essentially the afterlife, or something like it. A fellow with a head of flames named Modo has been banished to the mortal plain as punishment for being a power hungry jerk. Unfortunately he continues to be a power hungry jerk even then, so, as one of four "unlikely heroes" players have to decide whether to help or hinder his cause. They do this by selecting one of three alignments during the character creation segment.
I chose a Fat Friar as my character—for his high strength stat. You don't get to customize appearance, but you do get one very unusual choice: mortal or immortal. Mortal means what you would probably guess: no respawns. The instruction manual encourages us to try this mode, calling it "more fun." More realistic, sure, but even immortals have to go scouting for their skull to find all the gold they dropped, which feels like punishment enough.
Every character starts off at the Magic Academy in Avon. Your first task is to specialize in three types of magic, of the twelve in the game, except you don't actually to get to pick three from the full list. Instead you're limited by talking to three different professors who have three separate short lists. Later on you can find or create a scroll to learn other types of magic, but from the get go you can't, say, be radioactive and curse people.
The best part of Dawn of Magic kicks in right about here. As you learn different types of magic, your character's image is embellished with different physical features. As luck would have it, my combination of Bone, Light, and Fire ended up giving me an absolutely insane-looking character, almost like a Satan clown, with a tail, hooves, huge bone horns, and curved golden spikes for hands. My evil Baker's Wife grew mantis-like claws, possibly because of the poison spell.
Your final exam begins and the assignment depends on your alignment. Good characters have to hunt for eggs to help a sick student, neutral characters have to challenge other students in a hunt, and evil characters have to hunt while being attacked by the other students (who often shout "Go away!" or "I hope you die!" as you walk down the halls.) You'll notice that either way it amounts to a kill quest, but with varying degrees of difficulty.
Once you get to town, if you decide to bust up everyone's stuff to find gold the townspeople will shout at you to stop, and if you keep going they will start attacking you. Supposedly, holding Shift targets civilians, but magic spells seem to always hit them, which can be frustrating if you didn't mean it, because the guards tend to be overwhelming.
Questing is pretty much a pain. The side tasks are things like protecting a citizen, taking out smugglers, stopping the unholy church members from busting in on the holy church, and at least once playing hit-man for a shopkeeper looking for a little less competition. The least obnoxious kind of mission is the ubiquitous kill quest, while the most annoying are the kind where you have to chase people (e.g. someone's children, robbers) around, frantically clicking to round them up. Then they escape as you try to turn them in, starting the process again. Equally frustrating is the quest tracker, which keeps some active even after you change acts, but cancels others if you move to a new area.
Leveling up is a four step process, since you earn plusses with skill and spell points to get with them over the first three quarters of your experience point bar. Skills are easy enough to add points to, but spells require specific scrolls to level. I can understand needing scrolls to learn a spell in the first place, but having to track down one every time you have points available seems overkill.
Skills include Dark Path, a short range teleportation spell, which is useful for short-cuts or getting out of a mob of enemies, but also as an analogue to the /stuck command. You can also put skill points into different proficiencies, including the ability to craft and enhance gear with better materials and runes.
Enhancement has one interesting tweak: each rune has a syllable attached to it and you can use them to spell words if you have the scroll for the runic spell by inserting them into weapon or armor slots in the correct order. For example, Nostalgia uses Ho and Me to increase regeneration of both life and Chi (magic.) This system adds a bit of strategy to rune placement, since you don't just want to be enhancing and removing ad infinitum—that drains an item's durability.
Overall, Dawn of Magic looks pretty old school. Not too fancy, more than a couple jaggies. There are some nice lighting effects, though, lending the colorful environments a lot of warmth. Butterflies and falling leaves sometimes flutter by. Bizarrely, bits of the UI sway or flex in hypnotic motions—perfect for contemplating while letting your HP recharge after nearly getting schooled by a Goblin Matron or some such baddie.
Except when the exact same voice (not even the same guy, but the same voice) is used for a zillion lesser NPCs, the voice work is decent. Mullog sounds predictably like…well, spell Mullog backwards—that is, until he morphs into a huge boss monster. The dialogue is lovably strange, with the innkeeper shouting at a town meeting, "I guess it's time to rip his damn legs off!"
Sadly, the multiplayer scene here is pretty dismal. Capture the flag? Deathmatch? The trading map seems cool, but it's a very poor substitute for what really should be a co-op adventure.
Closing Comments
The box proclaims �A new era of hack �n� slash,� but Dawn of Magic strikes us as more of the same. Tweaks like the character mutations based on what spells you�ve learned are neat, but don�t have an impact on the gameplay itself. Lack of co-op is a disappointment. Despite a promising beginning to the story, general boredom ensued. Go ahead and hit snooze this morning.
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