Dawnmaker review - Light up the board, defeat the darkness!

• Take back the natural world from the Smog of darkness!
• Build various structures and facilities across the board game world
• Choose your engineer, build your deck, and strategise to become productive and victorious

The darkness can come from anywhere, and the powers that be only know how many stories have been written describing the different origins. Sometimes it's metaphorical, arising from the human soul and spreading to wreak absolute devastation on people at large; other times, it's literal darkness manifesting as shadows, sludge, and the like. Regardless of what form it takes, you're almost always asked to clear it away, fix it, or learn to live with it in a refreshing exercise of live and let live. But with Acram Digital, the darkness has become almost a physical presence on the digital board where Dawnmaker takes place. It may not be Catan, but we'll find out if you can build your way to fun.

What is Dawnmaker?

Board games can be simple, complex, or just give you elements and expect you to make whatever picture makes sense to you. With Dawnmaker, even though there's no cinematics or text scrolling across the screen, the details are pretty clear. The world is slowly being consumed by a dark force known as the Smog (inspired by the state of Los Angeles, which has existed in this condition for almost a century) and choking the life out of the land. However, a band of engineers has managed to escape the Smog on their airships and explore the land in search of open space. Using their technology, they can build facilities that can fight back the Smog, such as Aerostations and lighthouses. The time for innovation is now, so get to building.

The light of Dawnmaker

Digital board games almost always require you to play against other players to FEEL something, but there are those special occasions where you're against the board. Dawnmaker is one of those occasions, and it carries it well. The Catan reference holds strong, as the board uses a hexagonal pattern to give you plenty of options while keeping things clean and organised. The more things you build, the more things can seem overwhelming, but the board is presented in such a way that you can easily keep track of all your buildings, their effects, and their activation potential.

Once you become familiar with the board, you've got to keep an eye on all of the other important elements. If you decide to brave the board with little guidance, you may find yourself confused about what to do… That is, until you start clicking around. All the pieces you control are fairly intuitive: Resources, cards, and buildings. Each feeds into the other, and everything is clearly marked and explained, so after a terrible run or two, you'll get the hang of it. Turns can be quite quick with plenty of options in each one. You play a card, activate buildings, build buildings, or just survey the land to plan your next move.

The challenge comes from the same area that, again, can be seen in our old friend Catan: the win conditions. Most of the maps revolve around supporting and upgrading the Aerostation until it can be fully activated to beat back the smog. In order to upgrade the Aerostation, you need to generate certain resources, and some are rarer than others. To do THAT, you need buildings and those cost resources both to build and to activate. However, the Smog is constantly pushing against your settlement, and the longer it pushes, combined with the more you build, the more strain it puts on your resource production. You've got to maintain a careful balancing act of production and management so that you can strategically keep your head above water and push towards a win.

Dawnmaker of dark

Even though this is a good example of you versus the board game world, there are some problems that make it more of a struggle than a fair fight. Dawnmaker presents a lot, but some of its offerings carry less weight. The most prominent example is the engineers you choose to lead you. Even though they bring different effects to your strategy and the board, it's easy to forget they're even there, because in the end, it's just you. On top of that, there are only three engineers to choose from, and one of them is locked from the start.

A smaller but notable gripe is the lack of focus that hangs over the whole experience. While it's clear there's a lot to show, the resolution can only do so much. Even on the smaller screens, everything looks like it's been stroked with the fuzzy brush. It's still easy to see what everything is, but for an experience that depends on visuals, it would be nice to see how things look before the Smog gets to them.

Rise with the Dawnmaker

Dawnmaker is a top-down 2.5D strategy game about engineers trying to save the world from a poisonous fog through strategy and building. It's got a lot of layers that open many strategic doors, but still feels accessible with or without a stay in the tutorial booth. There's so much to see, but the fuzziness makes it trickier to appreciate the sights, and the leader mechanic could stand to be in the spotlight a little more. Speaking of light, you can't do much better than a device labelled the "dawnmaker"... but maybe, it's you who is truly meant to make the dawn, so time to rise.