Dawn of Discovery

Dawn of Discovery is a sequel in a series of games. While I had played the next most recent 1701 AD, I had played it on PC and thought that this series would be a good buy for the Wii. The fact that the game is also $15-$20 cheaper on the Wii sure did not hurt my decision.

Dawn of Discovery is a city building game that I would say is somewhere between SimCity and Civilization. In order to build your settlement you must find an island. Of course, there are several things to consider when choosing the island. Size is obviously important if you want to build the settlement to one of the larger classes. As your settlement grows more buildings and bonuses become available. So, choosing an island with room to grow is fairly important.

The second, and perhaps the most important thing to consider is the resources that are available on the island. Not every island can produce everything a settlement needs to grow. When choosing an island in the beginning it is wise to find one that will give the most basic of needs. As the settlement grows it is possible to find other islands to settle in order to expand the empire.

There are two gameplay modes available when you play Dawn of Discovery, Story Mode and Continuous Play. Story Mode is pretty much a very very long tutorial. There are seven chapters to play through with each teaching different aspects of the game. If you have played any of the games in the series then it would probably not hurt you to much if you went straight to continuous play. The game is rated 10+ and so the storyline is right up there with watching The Care Bears. In the Story Mode players take the role of William, the handsome and peace loving prince. William of course has a jealous brother who feels that war is the only way to succeed and *spoiler alert* it is no surprise that in the last chapter peace loving Prince William must eventually go to war and capture his evil brother. Oh, did I mention that Prince William gets to marry the beautiful and exotic princess in the end? *yawn*

While the game is fairly simple to play, a lack of planning can make it more difficult. Any mistakes are fairly easy to correct, but with good strategy players might be able to avoid most mistakes altogether. Some of the areas that I had trouble were mainly in maintaining enough goods to keep my citizens happy at the social class that they were in at any given time. As the population increases it puts a strain on resources. The reason this is a problem is because there is no easy way to gauge supply and demand. If the population's needs become greater than the supply a warning message is given, but if you do not have the resources to increase production the population quickly reverts to lower class levels taking their high tax dollars with them. A lack of income makes it even more difficult to increase production if the population needs several things at the same time.

Another problem I had with this game is that there is a serious lack of any real information. At times players are offered to pick a new technology that will give some sort of bonus. Sounds good, right? I am sure it is if there was any indication what these technologies actually do. Even when in the construction menu there is no information about these special buildings. Some are obvious such as houses and churches, but I still have no idea what a tea house actually does. I actually never even figured out how to save my game! There are points in Story Mode where it suggests that the game be saved, but that is about as close as it got for me. I honestly hope this is not a problem in Continuous Mode.

I know there seems to be a lot of negatives about this game, but I actually did enjoy playing it. The negatives that I have stated do make the game fairly frustrating at times and would probably make the game downright infuriating if the game had been any more complex. The good news is that the game is pretty simple and that might have just been its saving grace. The game is simple enough to understand and problems are simple enough to fix that even though the faults in the game could be major, they end up not effecting gameplay all that much.

I think that in the future I might give the PC version a try. I have a feeling that it will be much more in depth, which if the problems with the Wii version are not fixed could be a major waste of $50!

Dawn of Discovery (Wii)
Dawn of Discovery (DS)
Dawn of Discovery (PC)