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Dawnspire: Prelude

Vitals

Developer: Silent Grove Studios
Publisher: Silent Grove Studios
Genre: Adventure > Quest
Released: Aug 31, 2006
Players: 16

Website

- Top 100 Independent Games

- 2006 TOP 10 Games of the Year

- Top 10 Independent Games for December

- Dawnspire: Prelude Review

- 2006 Game of the Year: Graphics

John Bardinelli: 7

A great looking hack and slash multiplayer game with a good selection of characters and areas to explore. The emphasis isn't on building an avatar from the ground up by sacrificing your social life and/or trim figure. Instead, you just log in and start hacking. A surprisingly rich orchestral score accompanies you while you fight. I found the gameplay itself a little lackluster and repetitive. Unless you can get a strategy going with your teammates, all you do is run up to other players and slam your finger on the mouse button as fast as you can. Then you die, which is never fun.

Seth Robinson: 7

This is a team oriented online PVP fest where games are quick and it�"s about a lot of left clicking to move (WASD were basically unusable...) and using skills effectively. Like Once Upon a Time, the only single player action is standard play with bots. I hate this trend of not bothering to develop a single player/tutorial campaign and throwing people in the mix with only a few pop-up hints. Stick with it and you�"ll really enjoy the variety of characters, skills and strategies – providing you can find enough humans around to play with.

Brian Clair: 7

Dawnspire is a massively-multiplayer online fantasy game that focuses on player-vs-player action. What this translates to is that instead of fighting against NPC monsters as in most games (you can play against AI bots), you�"re going up other human players in a fight to the death. Currently the only gameplay mode in Dawnspire is a type of capture-the-flag where each team is up against the clock to capture three relics and bring them back to your base. At the same time, you need to defend your base against the enemy team who will attempt to steal your relics out from under you. If it sounds like Dawnspire is a work-in-progress, it is. The developers plan to continue expanding the title as time goes on. If you enjoy PVP action or have a group of friends to play with, then give Dawnspire a try. The full version is just $14.95, so there�"s a low cost of ownership; however, there weren�"t many people available to play against online either.

Russ Carroll: 9

Dawnspire is unfortunately often mistaken for a MMORPG, though it clearly is NOT one. It's more of an online action combat game with a lot of ability to customize your character. Think Counterstrike in a fantasy setting and you've got the general idea, though I found Dawnspire to be more fun than Counterstrike. In fact, Dawnspire was the most fun I've had playing an online since Orbz and anyone who knows me knows that is saying a lot. Each of the characters takes a bit of playing to fully master, but after playing several online multiplayer games this month I was awed by how much better this one was than everything else we played. Lots of fun and absolutely gorgeous too. There are a couple of quirky things about the interface, but I found them forgivable due to the amount of fun I had. I could go on, but will simply recommend that you immediately download this game and start playing the endless free trial.

By: The Illustrious Panel
Posted: Friday December 22, 2006