Review by: Troy S. Goodfellow

As American game development has taken a sharp turn towards console gaming or multiplatform releases, Europe has become the one of the last bastions of PC gaming in general and major strategy titles in particular. Culturally speaking, the European strategy games are generally more detailed, finicky and slowly paced than their American equivalents. Dawn of Discovery (Anno 1404 in the rest of the world) is very European.

The fifth game in a German city builder series, Dawn of Discovery has all the micromanagement people have come to expect from the Anno games. Want to make weapons? You’ll need an upper class. So you need fish, cider, and a chapel to upgrade your peasants to a middle class. Then you need hemp to make clothing, spices for the food, and a tavern for entertainment to get them to the upper class. Then an iron mine, a charcoal shed, bricks and timber and tools for residential improvements, an iron refinery and a weapons maker. You will not be going to war any time in the first hour or two. And if your island doesn’t have any of the important resources in this chain, you’ll need a second island or someplace to import the goods from.

So this is a game for the patient, a game for those who find the juggling of trade routes interesting enough to pass the time while you wait for your populations to hit that magic number for new building options. If you want to get to the fighting and fancy resources quickly, this is not the game for you.

The game’s central conceit is Occident versus Orient. Occidental islands are suited for one class of products and Oriental islands for another. Both cultures have unique architecture and building types, and access to the high level Oriental buildings means consuming the “honor” you earn from certain milestones. Ultimately a lot of this division means busy work. Your occidental residents need spices which only come from oriental islands, so you need a shipping lane. The variety of demands regularly outstrips the size of your fleet, so expect a lot of reworking those lanes. Sometimes the game feels like Cargo Tycoon more than Vasco de Gama Simulator.

The tutorial is deftly worked into the campaign game. You start with a partially developed city – they assume you can do things like build a house – and slowly get you up to speed with resident requirements and resource chains. The quests interrupt any natural growth you may have in mind for your city and the story itself isn’t that interesting. But the early stages of the campaign set the stage for the “continuous game”, a sandbox mode where you compete against AI players and roving pirates. Here is the real meat of the experience, full of new options and player driven goals to accompany the occasional quest from your royal master.

The tutorial does not do enough to make up for a woeful lack of documentation. How much room will I need for that high level structure? How many hemp fields do I need for both a rope and cloth factory? If I need beer, what crops do I need? Are there base prices for specific goods? Even essential aspects of warehouse management are left to either guesswork or familiarity with earlier titles. There are not enough rollover tips to compensate for a feeble booklet in the retail box. I have no idea what the poor Steam consumers will have to use.