Every year, there seems to be one single game released that manages to fly well below my proverbial radar and happens to be of incredibly high quality.  This year, that game is Dawn of Discovery (also known as Anno 1404) made by German developer Blue Byte, a studio owned by Ubisoft.  Dawn of Discovery is the “spiritual successor” to Blue Byte’s more famous city building/strategy game series, The Settlers, and the sequel to Anno 1701.  You are given control of a fief by the Emperor and soon turn a small, sparsely civilized island into a sprawling empire of your own.  Aside from a campaign mode, there is a “continuous play” sandbox mode, but no multiplayer.  But who needs multiplayer when you end up playing Dawn of Discovery for ten hours straight and not realize it?

Dawn of Discovery is such an immensely deep game that I could list off all the stuff I liked about it and still not have scratched the base of what exactly makes it so compelling.  Fans of any type of civilization building game will understand the basic concepts – you build your empire on the backs of the most basic workers and resources.  Basic peasants will allow you to build things like lumberjacks, cider farms, and fishing huts, and produce goods from those respective buildings.  Once you fulfill certain requirements, you’ll gain access to citizens who allow you to build hemp plantations and build things with stone and masonry.  Eventually you’ll gain access to nobility, pompous fuckers who drink a lot of beer and allow you to build extravagant buildings, like cathedrals.  At the heart of the game, you’re managing the resources and happiness of you empire (not individual units like a RTS game), but there is so much more – establishing colonies, managing fertile ground and soil for maximum production potential, keeping your population well fed, and establishing trade routes, among other things.  The more in-depth your empire gets, the more and more in depth individual buildings will get and the more elaborate the resource requirements will be for constructing them.  As far as graphics and sound go, Dawn of Discovery looks and sounds fantastic, and will probably scale rather well on lower end machines, if the amount of options in the graphics menu is any indicator.

My biggest gripe with Dawn of Discovery is the absolute shitfuck copy protection system it uses – Tagès, which must be French for “unnecessary”.  Tagès installs all kinds of bullshit on your system in order to play a single game and verify that it is indeed a legit copy.  Aside from that, the interface could be a bit friendlier in parts (mainly the quest dialog boxes) and multiplayer would be a great addition, but this shouldn’t stop you from giving Dawn of Discovery a try if you’re into the whole real time strategy or civilization simulation genre.  The game could also stand to have a friendlier tutorial section outside of the campaign mode, but I didn’t have much trouble picking it up.  The combat is also lackluster, but in my opinion it is not the central focus of the game – there are RTS games that do combat much better than Discovery would, so it gets a free pass from me here.

I’ve spent a good amount of time with Dawn of Discovery so far and have really only just started to understand a fraction of the complexities in this game.  City planning, resource use and production, road layout – all these things factor into how prosperous your empire will end up being, and understanding the intricacies of each one is most of the fun in playing it.  The campaign mode is well paced and often times I’d find myself completely engrossed in the game, only to realize that four or five hours of my life had just been spent trying to figure out the best layout for my hemp fields and tailoring huts.  For all it does right, it’s a shame Dawn of Discovery uses such an ass-backwards copyright protection system, but it really isn’t that big of a deal once you get into the game.  It’s fantastic and shouldn’t be missed if you’re a fan of the genre.