Strategy, hours of gameplay, vivid animations and endless fun await you in Dawn of Discovery for the Nintendo Wii: the latest civilization and city building game from UbiSoft. Now, that opening line may surprise you, if you have been a religious reader of Nintendo Wii reviews. The system that lives a generation behind its big brothers, the Xbox 360 and the PS3, has found life difficult outside of the casual party game. However, Dawn of Discovery bucks all those trends delivering a smart city building game that is not only fun for gamers of all ages, but also has a high level of strategic gameplay not found on most games on any system. Dawn of Discovery is set in the 1400s, as Europe, struggling from over population and famine, must expand their reach to found. There are two modes of play: story and continuous. The story mode will give gamers around 10 hours of gameplay that is engaging and visually captivating. You chose your avatar from one of the many characters you will encounter in the game, but during the story mode your primary characters of reference are Cornelius Davenport and Evelyn Bellard. These two serve as guides throughout the story mode. Cornelius is the sea-sick intellectual, who always plays it safe, while Evelyn is the risk taker, daring you to take chances. Their witty back and forth dialogue is a pleasure to listen to. I was amazed to find that this game was not just rich in strategy, but had a rich dialogue and superb character voicing as well.
The game features comical visuals to exploit the Wii’s technology. So everything about the game from the controls to way you “plop” buildings down has a cartoony feel. The colors are bright and vivid without being overdone. Also, all the characters you encounter are blown out caricatures of themselves.
Like any city building game, the goal of this game is to create, expand and maintain your new civilization. When you first leave the European shores, you will discover your first island. Your ship transforms into a Warehouse on the shore and will serve as your first base of operations. Gamers will immediately be limited by both space and resources. So, you will have to be smart about what to build and where you build it. After your warehouse is setup, you must build a house for your first pioneer. Of course, no house can be built without lumber, so you’ll have to create a lumberyard as well. Next, you’ll have to make sure that lumber can get from the lumberyard to the warehouse via roads, the basic setup of a city building game. In Dawn of Discovery, gamers have another goal: to make their pioneers advance up the social class.
As the population moves from pioneer, to settler and inevitably to aristocrats, their demands will increase. At first they only need food, which you setup by creating a fisherman’s market. Then you will have to setup a dairy and chapel for them to be happy enough to become settlers. The happier your population is, the more you can tax them. Yes, this game is also educational, although not really historical. With each new location built, you will have several obstacles working against you. Fires can breakout, which will require a fire station. Disease can come to your island, and will need hospitals to prevent an epidemic. You will even encounter some nasty rat infestation.
The more you build, the more it costs to maintain the buildings you created. This is one of the few downfalls of Dawn of Discovery. You will find yourself constantly fighting your dwindling finances. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to measure why or how much money you need to maintain everything. You will just have to “feel” it out. Early on in the game, gamers will often find that they have to sit and wait for their financial resources to rebuild. You’ll feel sorry for the president when you start raising taxes enormously to avoid bankruptcy. Luckily, you can sell anything from lumber to clothing to help you make money when your pockets are empty. Finances will be the main enemy you will need to overcome in this game. There are some interactions with raiding ships, but attacks make up only a small portion of your gameplay and are almost forgettable.
Much like real life, every island you begin to populate is different. Some will be rich in food, others stone, and others hemp for clothing. You will have to plan out how best to use the resources of the land to gain the most financial success. It may seem overwhelming at first, but luckily Cornelius and Evelyn are there to give you a guiding hand. The two serve as an ongoing tutorial to the game without being overbearing.
The gameplay is smooth and intuitive during your entire exploration. You can zoom into the island to see individual pockets of settlers working, or zoom out to look for more islands to settle. Instead of always going to your menu screen when you build something new, you can simply click the B button to copy an existing object. The navigation menu is both easy to use and intuitively laid out for any gamer.
Each time you choose to settle on a different island, you will lose your exploration ship, as it is turned into the island’s Warehouse. So, you will need to create a ship manufacturing plant to make another exploration ship. The ship’s wacky navigation system is as cartoony as the rest of the game. So, although you may find yourself sailing the ship on its side, and making unimaginably sharp turns and donuts in the ocean, it all fits within the Dawn of Discovery motif.
By the time you reach the third chapter, and enter the Seaport level of civilization (the biggest level is the metropolis, which only earn from the Sultan), you will begin treasure hunting. For some strange reason, in this level you have to re-unlock buildings that you have already worked with, which is a bit annoying. The seaport level gives you access to the Oriental Market, where you can by treasure maps of where the Corsairs regularly sink ships. New maps open up new places in the ocean you can travel to, as well as allowing you to find more money or objects for trade. As your population grows so will the need to defend your population, and you will finally gain access to a military of sorts. This amounts to a simple barracks with troops to deploy and is as forgettable as running away from raiding Corsair ships.
The Continuous game quickly takes Dawn of Discovery a notch over other strategy games. You would think your gaming would be done at the end of the story mode, but that is not the case. The Continuous mode allows you to use your experience in the story mode in a free play civilization building adventure. You can also add enemy AI and decide on the size of your world. This boosts the replay value of this game immensely. There is also a multiplayer component, but it does little to warrant noting. The second player only takes over some of the work you can do on your own.
Dawn of Discovery is one game that comically brings to life the age of colonization. This title is fun for all ages, and may just be the best Wii strategy game out. Hats off to UbiSoft for putting this game on the market and reminding the world that there is life still in the Wii. For the low price of $29.99, you can’t go wrong.
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