With a team selected from AION, Jagged Alliance Online, Rainbow Moon, Settlers 7, War of Worlds and Lords and Knights, Days of Dawn has an incredible amount of experience backing the project. However, they are setting out to do something completely new in the world of RPG gaming. The closest the industry has to it is Dragon’s Crown—both games specialize in highly detailed, hand-crafted sprites and animation sequences. They differ in the fact that one is a typical melee game, while the other is a classic RPG. With a unique magic system and beautiful graphics filling the game, Days of Dawn will be a ground-breaking RPG.
The major feature of the game is, of course, its hand-crafted sprites. In a digital painting style that imitates traditional techniques, all of the animations and environments are carefully crafted so that the game looks exactly like a painting. Combined with incredibly good character art, this puts a welcome spin on retro sprite games—it takes carries over everything good about the game play and finds a way to upgrade the graphics without losing the character of a classic game. Looking at their video previews, it also appears that the games have a dynamic lighting system, which shows the team has put a lot of work into these sprites and their hidden height maps.
For gamers who couldn’t care less if a game looked good, there’s plenty of content in Days of Dawn behind that pretty face. The magic system runs on personality and emotion. The choices you make affect what kind of outbursts (or magic spells) that you are able to cast, and there are several different paths for your characters to explore. The round-based combat system plays like older Final Fantasy games, so fans of that old series should feel at home in this game. You can recruit party members from a handful of characters, although only three can stay in your party permanently. Despite being presented as a classic RPG, you will also be able to pursue multiple storylines—the game is both non-linear and open-world.
Although the game looks dazzling, there are a few bits of it that have me worried. The plot and the setting appear to be very cliché, taking place in a typical medieval fantasy world. At the same time, typical medieval fantasy didn’t have oddly cute monsters roaming around, so perhaps there’s a lot more to the story than the Kickstarter campaigners are willing to reveal. In any case, the music is incredibly fitting, and shows the musician’s experience in the field. All of the game’s elements are brought together perfectly by the developer studio, Bumblebee, and the game looks like it will be a welcome addition to the genre for RPG fans. With its unique visual character and classic game play, it’s sure to delight fans of other genres as well. If you are interested in supporting the game, be sure to check out the Days of Dawn Kickstarter page and help the developers get this game off the ground.
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