Review | Another Dawn

Buyer’s remorse, or in my case review remorse. We’ve all had that before, normally after a few hours or in rare cases after half an hour or so. In Another Dawn‘s case, you’ll have this remorse in the very first second of playing. We know we know… everyone makes impulsive purchases but oh boy.. you will curse yourself for not checking out our review for Another Dawn first as this is honestly one of the worst games I ever played. Not once did I have this instant feeling of extreme dislike and trust me I have played over 3000 Xbox games, the likes of Fighter Within, Rugby 15, Soda Drinker Pro, or the recently released Teratopia and a previous game from developer KR Games Allison’s Diary: Rebirth, all low rated games but nothing comes close, it is that bad, shockingly bad. ‘A tropical island suddenly becomes your worst nightmare’ is on the game hub on the Xbox Store, they are right though. Another Dawn is my worst nightmare.

We played Another Dawn for two hours on Series X

What we liked!

• Nothing: I always try to look for something positive but Another Dawn simply doesn’t have anything positive to mention. It has weird looking animations, it tries to look good but completely fails, the lighting is awful, sound is terrible, the controls are laughable and the developer didn’t even seem to test-play it, I was completely lost on what to do and it is a glitchy mess.

Somewhere between

• Nothing: I think this is the first time that a game on LifeisXbox managed to avoid the what we liked and somewhere between section. I’m a bit annoyed to say that everything is bad about Another Dawn.

What we disliked

• Horrendous first impression and death: The first couple of minutes provides everything to write a book about how bad Another Dawn is. I decided to write about my first three deaths. Your character wakes up on a rowboat, no clue as to why as the previous cutscene didn’t explain a thing. After taking control of your character you seem to do eight flying forward one-and-a-half somersaults winning a gold medal at every single Olympic game. Why? The camera’s sensibility is hilariously terrible, a slight nudge on the analog stick and you turn around fifty-five times. I was just using a brand-new Razer Wolverine V2 controller and I was afraid I would puke all over it. After ‘trying to fix’ this at the settings the next thing I noticed was a new fish species, one that can make itself invisible. Four fishes around me just vanished and reappeared every few seconds, water effects were all over the place, and gosh.. those swimming animations. *huge facepalm* I get ashore, wait.. my character is still stuck in the swimming animation? Oh.. and now he died as he drowned while walking around on the beach. *another facepalm*
• Horrendous second impression and death: After my glitchy ending I restart the game. Still having issues with the control sensibility despite lowering it, I just can’t find the right movement speed. The game mentions that I have to find my back bag, I have absolutely no clue where it could be so I search around. In the distance I see a person walking on the beach, at that time it wasn’t clear at all that this was an enemy. I get close and it takes a while before I understand what is happening but apparantly that person now turned into a blurry mess with unclear animations was shooting some kind of awful-sounding gun at me. I walk into the forest and get stuck in the tree roots eventually, the enemy kills me. *another facepalm*
• Horrendous third impression and death: Watching the unskippable starting cutscene again, I noticed it before but damn those fake sunlight beams look simply disgusting. Meeting the same pop-up fishes again and now I try to avoid the patrolling enemy on the beach. I decide to go into the forest, now I can imagine that when I say forest you think about a dense forest with beautiful details but think again. While it was clearly the design choice s to try and make stunning environments like for example Crysis it utterly failed. Lighting effects don’t make sense, everything is very low in detail and the pop-up is unthinkably bad. Your character can also move through everything and the walking and running animation is just like the swimming animations, godawful. After searching for a while I finally find that damn back bag, in a completely similar-looking hut. I can imagine that some players will have to spent hours finding it. Can’t even imagine playing it for ‘hours’ but anyway. Now my third time dying happens since a stealth kill completely fails, I sneak my way up to the guard in a tower and press the correct button. It fails and he suddenly has eyes on his back and starts to shoot me, while his gun is facing the opposite direction it immediately manages to hit me. So we have a new species of fish, a hidden back bag somewhere in the middle of fucking nowhere and now guns can turn 180 degrees. I manage to get out of the tower alive but the guard manages to kill me while I was hiding behind a stupidly large rock. *facepalm*

CONCLUSION

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