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Dawn of Heroes: Reviews

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Game Score: 9/10

Dawn of Heroes is a strategy RPG from Majesco which places tons of emphasis on the "strategy" part.

Graphics:
The game's fights are split across the top and bottom screens. On the bottom, you have a simplified version of the field, laid out on a grid. Using the stylus, you can control your units and select abilities to use on your foes. The upper screen contains a fully 3D depiction of the battlefield, which actually looks surprisingly good given the DS hardware. The units are detailed to about the same level as you'd expect in an N64 game, but there are also a few dynamic sources of light on some maps which look especially pleasing.

Dawn of Heroes has a cartoony art style, which is quite unique. The character portraits are bug-eyed and filled with detail, making them a great addition to the game. The world map you select stages and towns from is 2D and serves its purpose. The majority of your time will be spent in battle.

Sound:
There isn't a ton of sound in this game. Most of them are quite jarring and are much louder than the music, even causing me to turn down the volume when certain abilities were cast. The music, on the other hand, is excellent. There are multiple battle themes which match the type of stage (ie: city, desert, mountain, etc), and I haven't found a single tune that I don't like.

Gameplay:
This is where Dawn of Heroes does things right (well, depending on your tastes). As mentioned in the introduction, the game leans heavily on the "strategy" aspect. Powering your way through many stages with high damage characters simply does not work.

Most of the battles are almost puzzle-like in nature. For example, one stage has you battling four powerful sages on top of a mountain with only two of your own characters. Each sage can simultaneously revive all of his allies in a single turn, but also carries a passive which causes them to deal magical damage to all nearby units (friend or foe) on death. The only viable way to defeat them is to cause a chain-reaction of passive activations which leads to them all blowing up in unison.

There are 26 different characters you can recruit, each totally unique from the rest with their own palette of five skills and three passives. Abilities range from standard damage spells to much more advanced abilities, such as AoE taunts, knock-backs, disables, and more. The variety is immense, though the customization of each individual character is limited.

Dawn of Heroes allows you to rename your characters as much as want, change your team's colour, and swap out different kinds of equipment following a prefix-bonus system similar to titles like Diablo 2 or Divine Divinity. Rather than having each individual character gain their own levels, your entire team has one single experience meter, and everyone levels up in unison. New recruits are automatically upped to this level, so grinding is more or less thrown out the window. If you wish, however, you may still grind on past stages.

Overall score: 9/10