The last few years have been pretty big for Survival Crafting games.
If you aren’t familiar, a survival crafting game is pretty self-explanatory. You are dropped with nothing or next to nothing into a hostile wilderness and made to survive Bear Grylls style by gathering food and water and crafting tools and shelters to brave the elements. The genre was arguably popularized by Rust, a game released in 2006 that contains many of the core elements and formulas that these titles emulate. However, it can be argued that the genre dates back to as early as 1992 with the game UnReal World.
Survival craft games are notoriously difficult to make, but thanks to the Unreal Engine and other advancements to indie game creation, the genre has been exploding with new titles lately as the complex mechanics become more accessible for smaller creators to implement. While many of these games feel similar, almost as if most of them are created using the same assets or packaged mechanics, my stance is always the same: as long as the game does something new and interesting, be it with the setting or the mechanics, it gets a pass in my book and is definitely worth checking out.
Enter Dawn of Defiance, a new survival craft in Early Access that definitely ventures into the territory of originality. Dawn of Defiance is a survival crafting game that stands out in the genre for its unique setting, based on Greek myth and antiquity.
We’ve seen a few other titles take historical fantasy as inspiration for their survival craft settings. Many use Nordic myth as their inspiration, with Valheim, Enshrouded, and Aska being notable examples. I’ve even seen Aztec mythology portrayed well in Soulmask, but something we haven’t seen done yet is Greek myth. This feels kinda odd to me, considering just how much there is to get from Greek Mythology as a setting, but it would seem that Dawn of Defiance is the first to do it.
Dawn of Defiance definitely feels like the Greek epics it’s inspired by—arming players with the weapons and armor of Greek hoplites and littering the world with temples and shrines to the pantheon of Mount Olympus. The world certainly looks like the Greek isles, too; brown and green fields of grass lie under stark white rocks and mountains with marble ruins scattered about. The whole game looks exactly like I imagined the scenes in Homer’s Odyssey.
I do, however, think the current player model and a lot of the gear could use an update. The humanoids in the game look dull and stiff and are not very interesting to look at. Adding some character customization would also be great, as right now,, you spawn in with the same generic bearded dude model.
The map is absolutely gorgeous, sometimes to a fault. Tracking animals through the tall grass can certainly be a chore. One of the earliest missions tasks you with hunting three rabbits, and I must have spent nearly 20 minutes just doing that, constantly losing the tiny Hares as they bolted through wheat fields.
As far as survival and crafting mechanics go, Dawn of Defiance is pretty solid. Crafting is instantaneous; your workbenches take resources from your chests, and there is a good variety of resources without the loot pool feeling unnecessarily large. I think the building could use some work, but it’s good enough in the game’s Early Access state.
The game is not a PVP-style survival craft; it takes a PVE approach. You and up to three other friends can share a world together and complete objectives together, fighting off hordes of the Lost (a visually interesting sort of Greek Drauger enemy) and building your bases as you challenge the gods for power.
In its current build, Dawn of Defiance does not do combat very well. Equipping a bow or a shield and spear or sword, combat against the AI enemies usually consists of you just blocking, dodging, and then mashing the attack button as much as you can. While enemies do have movesets you can learn and movement abilities, combat for the player is pretty boring and basic to a fault, lacking any combos or attack patterns of your own. It really just comes down to equipping weapons with the best stats and trying to spam-kill enemies before they get the chance to attack, blocking, or dodging here or there when you have to.
While combat in the current build is boring, Dawn of Defiance does do something interesting in giving you god-like powers, unlocked by making offerings to shrines and completing missions. The game essentially makes you a superman, with you gaining the ability to air dash, fly, and ignore all fall damage before leaving the starting island.
While they may seem simple, these powers go a long way to making the game more enjoyable. Flying up hills and dashing from place to place makes you feel powerful and makes traveling around the map looking for resources feel less of a chore. I only wish the stamina cost for these abilities was greatly reduced because the duration of flying and dashing always felt just a bit too short to be totally satisfying.
For an early access title, Dawn of Defiance has a lot of promise. It goes a unique route for a survival crafting game, giving you the powers of a god as you progress through the game and having a unique setting that I haven’t yet seen in the genre. If the game could simply improve on its combat, adding in a more combo-oriented system, maybe adding in more combat skills and weapon sets, it could be a fantastic entry into the genre. While not totally necessary, I’d also like to see the game swap out its humanoid models and gear sets for more visually interesting ones, adding to the game’s unique flavor in visual areas where it, unfortunately, feels a little bland.
Pros:
- An interesting setting not yet done in the genre
- Fun powers with simple abilities that go a long way in making the game enjoyable
- Solid crafting mechanics
Cons:
- Bare bones, unexciting combat
- Adjustments need to be made to some game values, such as the amount of stamina players have.
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