Dawn Awaits is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This platformer is particularly badly made, with clunky controls and godawful, unforgiving and yet also inaccurately placed hitboxes. It's one of those platformers that uses the "move two characters with the same controls" gimmicks, and this is the worst implementation of that I've seen.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
Dawn Awaits is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this, and all in Chinese. On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
This is a little disturbing as the developer indicates they started stalking me and feverishly reading through my reviews... either just obsession with me on their part, or desperation to try find something in one of my other reviews that would somehow change the objectively terrible quality of this failed "game". Whatever their motivation, creeping on reviewers like this is [b]not okay[/b]. See how the developer is so quick to try push attention away from the facts about his game, and attacks me instead? There's a reason for that... what a crappy move from an objectively failed and incompetent developer.
The "developer" then argues that I review a lot of games, therefore this game review isn't valid or truthful. Huh. If I changed all my other reviews to positive, would the graphics and gameplay of this crap game suddenly improve? No. The developer seeks any possible angle to throw shade at me personally to discredit my review. You can see what they are trying to do. If this was the only review I have ever written, would that change any of the properties of this game or alter the facts contained in my review? Of course not. [b]My reviews for other games have no bearing on the dismal quality of this failed product[/b].
So this is just part of a pattern of delusion from a failed developer. This game is a failure; this isn't something I "made up", it's backed by referencable fact from SteamDB that shows an astonishing ZERO player count... with one exception, the day all the fake reviews for the game suddenly appeared, when there was a single spike in player counts... you can see what happened there... those people weren't sincerely playing the game, just making sure they had enough time on it banked to write the fake reviews. The data clearly shows NOBODY is playing this garbage. Nobody even launches it for weeks at a time. Anyone who does, quickly deletes it. That's what failure looks like. That's what this is... failure.
The developer chooses to attack the review by failing to acknowledge the real reason they used crap pixel "art" instead of doing their job properly and arranging contemporary visuals. We all know if they were capable of doing better, they would. But they didn't... a pathetic inadequacy that should not be a problem for gamers to have to put up with. Developers like this give genuine amateur devs a bad name. How many AAA games are made with pixelcrap? Why don't AAA studios or professional game developers use it? Why were 3D graphics cards invented? See the laughable intellectual bankruptcy from this failure trying to come up with excuses for his incompetence and failure? What a joke.
Which leads into the ridiculous BS, an outright fabrication, that this was "extensively tested". Extensive testing showed people didn't want an options menu or better graphics? WTF. A weird lie. Remember, this game is an objective failure. Either everyone is lying to the developer, or he's lying to himself (yes), or both. It's just embarrassing at this point.
The developer then shoots himself in the foot in the most embarrassing way possible by pointing out nobody ever played this for longer than 10 minutes, it's that bad people book dentist appointments so they have an excuse not to play it. Seriously, what a joke!
Finally, the developer of this train wreck [b]demands[/b] that my review instruct them on how to make video games, because they obviously don't know, looking at this dismal failure of this product.
There is no obligation for reviews to be constructive. Reviews are not written to teach developers how to make games. They should know this before they release products on Steam. If they don't, why does this have to be a problem for gamers?
[b]Video game reviews are to inform gamers on their decisions around which games to buy, download, or spend their time playing.[/b]
The developers appalling attitude and inability from a basic psychological standpoint to understand and accept why he's such a failure explains so much about why such a bad product ended up on Steam, but it excuses none of it.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this failed game to anyone.
