Dawnspire: Prelude (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.1 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Brett Todd
• Reviewed on: 04/13/2007
• Released on: 04/03/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Dawnspire: Prelude (PC) Review

Dawnspire: Prelude may not cost anything in monthly fees, but this hacking-and-slashing online role player from Silent Grove Studios isn't quite worth playing even if you're getting it on the cheap. While there is a tremendous amount of potential here, the game isn't totally ready for prime time, thanks to subpar artificial intelligence and a shortage of human players.

For those who've never experienced online Diablo in all its addictive glory, the concept here is simple to grasp. You log in, team up with buddies, and proceed to slaughter and loot your way through one dungeon after another until your mouse finger seizes up from the incessant clicking. Gameplay here varies little from those core clickfesty concepts, although it does introduce a dash of online first-person shooters courtesy of Relic Conquest, its capture-the-flag-inspired single mode of play (and apparently more are in the works). So instead of wandering dungeons, you sign up with the light or dark teams and, on fantasy-inspired outdoor maps, fight over three magical artifacts that need to be installed in your base to earn victory.

The RPG backbone of the game is equally straightforward. After registering a free account, you go through a quickie character-creation process where you think up a name, pick from a traditional D&D-style crew of classes that includes stand-ins for the tried-and-true cleric, mage, thief, fighter, and barbarian, and then dole out skill points among standard stat categories like health and mana. Combat is fairly simplistic for the most part, too, although in addition to melee battles with traditional fantasy accoutrements like swords and staves, you also need to astutely use a handful of class-specific special powers like the templar's clericlike heal and angelic armor, the seeker's barbarian-style berserker fury and bullrush, and the witch's nature's wrath and plague of weakness spells. All of these skills are chosen during character creation, either by custom-selecting them or by picking from two or three default loadouts.

Essentially, this is the sort of click-to-kill game you can pick up and get playing in about five minutes. But even though it has been designed for action fans who always select their RPGs from the light menu, the confined, island-style maps and rock-paper-scissors interaction of the character classes can add a lot of intensity and strategy to matches. Teamwork is vital, as characters left on their own can get shredded. You need to think of teams as you would standard D&D parties, which means that a witch needs the brute force of the melee-fighting reaver on her side, a templar requires healing and buffing skills whenever sending a seeker or a shadowblade assassin into battle, and so on. Forget this basic rule and you can get into trouble fast. You really don't want to leave a templar alone against a reaver, especially when he gets his whirlwind attack going.

Unfortunately, the appeal of a multiplayer game like this is almost totally dependent on drawing a good crowd of players, and so far Dawnspire has failed to attract many fans. There are three servers running the retail game at present, and each is devoid of other human players much of the time. Occasionally, you'll run into a reasonably full complement of 14 to 16 players who know what they're doing, and then all of the game's potential comes out. Intense matches are always the result when you get into a good game with smart allies who know the maps and realize the importance of working as part of a team. But it's more likely that you'll encounter just one or two human players and that the rest of the playing field will be filled out with bots. At times like that, you might as well not even bother logging on to a server and just play the game in the all-bot practice mode.

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Dawnspire: Prelude (PC): $7.74

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