Dawn of Warriors: Chaos War Review

Dawn of Warriors: Chaos War is a conflicted entry into mobile gaming canon. You’re dropped into The Encampment, and from there begin your journey. There is little preamble to what led to the current state of affairs other than that Lucifer’s army is at the gate. An angelic messenger points you to a menu where quests are offered via a bounty board that essentially lists which bosses can be found in each zone.

DoW contains traces of hardcore elements that ultimately fail to be implemented in a fashion conducive to engagement. Characters can utilize any of over 50 skills as well as a host of different weapon types, with the ability to switch to standby weapons at a moment’s notice. Skills are bound in one-use tomes and equipment. There’s a handy merchant who lets you level-up equipment, reset your equipment’s skills for when you find that upgrade that doesn’t have the load out you want, or reset your equipment’s skill modifiers.

Dawn of Warrior’s level-up’s let you increase your stats in typical RPG fashion. There are also a variety of guilds that offer partners for you to use in your travels after you meet the prerequisite challenge of fighting the different tiers of guild members to prove yourself worthy of hiring them. You can have up to six partners.

The developers also provided a mode called the “Skill House” as an asset to players. It is an instance players can use from the start to check out all the skills available by giving them a character set up with all the options available in the inventory. You can even have a large pool of stat points to use to get a better feel for the numbers to optimize your build.

Touch-screen combat plays out in a top-down fashion similar to hack-n-slash ARPG’s like Diablo. Simply tapping abilities causes your character to attack the nearest target. This poses a problem, however, when the map is littered with troublesome rats or sheep that your character will occasionally prioritize over the monsters that are slapping your partner around. Players need to tap their partner’s icon before using potions, buffs, or healing skills on them. This combined with the difficulty in targeting within battlefields full of enemies and NPCs often makes it markedly difficult to keep your target selected. Your partner tends to pick fights with the nearest enemy. They will also share your target, but it becomes a struggle when you find yourself having to simultaneously click your targets and heal your partner. This often leads to things getting out of whack quickly in battle. By mid-game, these difficulties with combat and managing followers became the largest detractor from the game’s appeal for me.

DoW Challenge Tower provides a relatively engaging option for players looking to take a break from the main game. The Challenge Tower creates a randomly generated dungeon for you to explore on a whim. These can be useful for leveling up fresh partners at an appropriate difficulty as well as an opportunity to find loot and resources outside of the story map.

Speaking of resources, DoW includes a property system. You buy property by using the wood, stone, and metal you collect from the world. You purchase land using these resources and gold. In turn, property provides a profit per in-game week. Merchants’ item stock also refreshes on this cycle. This is important for those who prefer to buy their resources as opposed to mining them in the world. I imagine that, like me, players are liable to click through these pop-ups, especially in the middle of combat. Most of the property systems works rather well, although a visible internal game clock would make the passage of time from one cycle to the next more clear so that players could have some idea of how close they are to their next check –  a lazy oversight that will hopefully be addressed in a future patch.

Dawn of Warriors: Chaos War’s is essentially composed of several disparate pieces that struggle to fit together. While the NPCs littering some of the game’s battlefields add an interesting element to certain zones, they ultimately just provide another opportunity to struggle with the game’s AI and mechanics. Too often, I found myself spending gold to revive my partner after they’d been victimized by the game’s poorly implemented control scheme. The walls within some of the game’s more labyrinthine dungeons reveal another weakness. Occasionally, I found enemies trapped within them. I soon found out that moving your character too close can lead to the player getting caught in the walls as well. This position ends with you being unable to escape the poorly implemented boundaries and forces you to save and quit, resulting in starting back at The Encampment. Unfortunately these sorts of annoyances crop up constantly. I really can’t imagine attempting the harder difficulties or hardcore mode.

In the end, Dawn of Warriors: Chaos War might work well for some RPG fans as an entertaining time killer, but the rest of us will find it hard to get immersed in a game where we’re forced to work around so many pitfalls.