Dread Dawn is an open world zombie survival game that tries to harmonize familiar genre tropes with an original touch, but fails to do so.
When a game stops being fun and starts getting in the way of your actual life, something special begins to emerge from it, and the best description of this genre of entertainment is, system tourism.
It’s not some enjoyable thing in a traditional sense, not desiring for enjoyment or simply poking around to try and find something odd or something that is funny that you can steal a moment to look at. “Dread Dawn” is a ton of poking, but no reward to be had.
From the get go “Dread Dawn” is full of promise. You’re in a school hiding out with other survivors after what is typical for a zombie apocalypse.
The isometric camera provides us with a desperate almost frantic view of the scene – makeshift fires and sleeping bags. It’ll be atmosphere, especially sound design.
The sounds ripping at eardrums are a chaotic cacophony of alarms, panicked chatter, and the distant barks of dogs all together creating a terrifying soundscape as it should for what should have been a gripping survival experience. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few highlights.
Your first mission is simple: go check on your sister in the girl’s dorm. As you make your way through the house, you’ll find hints what ‘Dread Dawn’ could have been, such accidental Kicking a Football into a survivor and causing some unintended Chaos.
These are the kinds of moments that indicate that there is systemic messiness, that there are things that happen that really you shouldn’t be able to get out of that lead to scenarios that are very interesting, but never do. Only to bubble up, briefly, and disappear without ever truly living up to the dream.
Especially in ‘Dread Dawn’, their core mechanic for looting is just one of the things that just sucks. What you find is interesting, but the looting is a whole other experience, one of waiting.
The process is slow no matter where you’re looking and inventory management won’t be feasible fast. Inventory space is limited, so you are constantly making decisions about what to keep, and worrying you’ll leave valuable things behind.
Finally, the game’s economy itself only terrifies you more with weird price points such as $200 for a gun or $800 for a cooked chicken.
The odd imbalance of this imbalanced game gives you an ever so slight feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out) as things all start feeling like it could be useful later but it draws the game to a crawl just looting things.
It’s just as bad in combat. They have the hordes of zombies you can face at once down to a painfully impressive size, but they’re forgotten; bunching up behind you; there’s just a single leader.
The game kind of leaves this mechanical explanation out, which is unnecessary confusing. The first time you do finally engage in combat, and regardless of whether it’s with a pistol or some kind of melee weapon like a screwdriver, it feels bad.
The weapons feel weak, and, more importantly, melee combat is awkward and zombies barely react to your attacks.
Tower defense is a new game mechanic that you need to use to fend off waves of zombies with your build defenses. Unfortunately, that also goes flat.
The concept of crafting and base building is shallow and uninspired, and after a while you’re left with the thought of a rote, uninspired system that contributes nothing to the greater experience.
Some of these have a few amusing moments (for example, finding a skateboard of some sort to help you ride around for a little bit), but this is rare. Small pleasures tip away in the blizzards of progress, the slowness of the game and clunkiness of its systems.
A bit of a standout feature is the water hoses, which are used to put out fires in some areas. Surprisingly they work well and have the satisfying physics of something that oddly doesn’t fit in a world where so much else falls short.
Random, frustrating deaths also haunt “Dread Dawn.” Fighter jets can carpet bomb you only to wipe out with minimal warning, and autosaves gone poorly can get you pinned down in an inescapable situation.
Spawning into a horde of zombie or so close to hostile turrets that you aren’t even sure if you can shoot back. Game mechanics make you feel like there’s danger and the unknown are about to bite into your existence, but sadly the game is unfair and it was poorly executed.
Conclusion
While the paint for ‘Dread Dawn’ was there to create an involving zombie survival experience, it’s been layered all under poor mechanics and an uninspired delivery. Such moments, though, as its sound design is so excellent, or its water hoses for example, aren’t enough to make it.
If you’re looking to kill zombies then there are far better games out there for your time. That all said, the effort required for “Dread Dawn” is not worth it.
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