Another Dawn Review

"A Painful Dawn"

Campaign

February 4, 2021 at 9:44pm
By Jason Stettner

I believe the developers had the best of intentions with this one, and I do feel kind of bad writing this but in general this is probably the second worst game I’ve ever played on Xbox. I’ve covered many, many games over the years and this one just is abysmal. I really tried my best to enjoy this as the concept isn’t bad, but it’s just a mess.

First off, it’s a very short game but it’ll take awhile for some since dying sends you back to the start of a level area. Not the worst as the levels are short, but it can be just awful when the game is terrible to play with some just pitiful performance towards the end. I want to add that I’m playing this on Xbox Series X, I was genuinely shocked by the performance in the last levels. Anyways, the just of the story is that I believe your family has been taken while you’re sitting in a boat.

With no guidance at all and through some groaning you’re directed to find a backpack. It took me quite a few times to understand what I was doing, and an actual guide to find the backpack. There’s no tutorial, no context and I’ve never been this confused with what I was supposed to do. The enemies have terrible pathing and detection. They’re able to fire at you while crouching and looking away while slightly moving from you.

This makes them hard to hit with melee weapons, and it’s just horribly done. Once you get a gun it’s better, but it’s so hard to aim in this and you can be shot easily through walls or objects with no sense of where bullets are coming from. Then jelly rains down your screen and you’re just perplexed by why. From that first area it’s actually very linear in design, I was expecting an open world. The story itself doesn’t really get the context aside with the weirdest sci-fi angle that might have made this cool if the game itself wasn’t completely horrible.

Gameplay

The first thing you should do when playing is turn down the sensitivity the whole way. It’s ridiculous, also dialing down difficulty might help but it really does nothing to make this feel better. Also, be sure to grab food and water occasionally in levels as the survival mechanic needs you to do that occasionally. It’s a useless mechanic, doesn’t make any sense in this type of game but it’s there and just stupid mostly. There are a few weapons you can use, it’s hard to aim and hit the AI with any of them.

There’s not really any stealth as the enemies know exactly where you are, even from a distance. The visuals are awful, it’s very glowy and it gets really bad sometimes. You have areas with floating trees, poorly placed textures and just ugly looking locations. The first place you start looks the best, and even then it’s not great.

I liked the sci-fi base type areas, but the performance there is vomit inducing and basically unplayable. For a game that’s Xbox Series X Optimized targeting 60fps there should be no issues in that spot, none at all. Oh, HDR is supported here and it’s a Xbox Play Anywhere title so those features are nice if the game was decent. I did experience some crashing, and other technical bugs while playing. Again, it’s not very long so you’ll probably complete it in under an hour or so if you can handle playing it.

The Conclusion

Another Dawn is an abysmal experience with performance issues, excruciating AI implementation and ugly environments. You might not even be sure how to finish the first level since you need to walk through a wall to get it finished.

It doesn’t make much sense, and isn’t at all fun to play. I feel that the developers had the best of intentions with this one but it’s awful. It isn’t fun to play, it’s not appealing and only the concept is of any value here. It’s disappointing I suppose, as I don’t necessarily love writing these types of reviews.

It just sucks, like quite honestly. It has some crashes, bad performance issues towards the end and it’s super fast to play through problems aside. Definitely not an experience I’d like to have again, that’s for sure. I could write more, but I want to put this experience behind me and hopefully forget it forever.

Read our Hunt Simulator 2 Review
View our Game Hubs

Another Dawn Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by KR Games

Rating Overall: 0.5