Game Reviews

Ubisoft's latest expansion for their popular city building game Dawn of Discovery injects new ships, items, environments and scenarios into an elaborate diplomatic, economic, and logistical strategy simulation. Dawn of Discovery is a deep and complex game that offers players a fun and accessible city building experience. While features like intricate city planning, trade route mapping and resource tree management place this game firmly in the simulation genre, its modest combat and quest systems put it on a short list of titles that often receive the strategy label. Related Designs and Blue Byte Software created the Venice update to add new game play and hundreds of new quests to the game, but this expansion appears to exist primarily to assuage players' demands for multiplayer.

If players want to continue to enjoy Dawn of Discovery there are 15 new pre-made scenarios in which to discover around 300 new quests and 50 or 60 new items. Among the gameplay enhancements is the ability to take over enemy cities without warships. By infiltrating their city, spies can unleash havoc on an opponent's population. If a player has significant resources they have another new non-violent way to win through Influence. Every city's government can now be taken over by buying City Council seats. There are also two new sizes in trading ships, items that allow ships to be boarded and taken over, a new Venetian style city and faction, and a new type of terrain on volcanic islands. Still, for most players the only reason to get this is to experience online multiplayer with a friend. Adding spies to the game does not relieve players from their essential city building responsibilities and resource management tasks; they just offer a new way to attack enemies. Since combat options are limited, the additional choice is a welcome one, but it hardly makes combat diverse. The Base of Operations structure is both the gateway to acquiring access to spies, and the counter to a sabotage attack from an enemy spy. It protects structures within its range just as a Church provides for faith within a certain radius. Infiltrating an enemy island is a difficult proposition until the defenses are cleared away a bit. At that point it's anticipated that the player will send in a spy. Soon this routine becomes predictable and players are relegated to a brute force attack or a buy-out. Initially the opportunity to sabotage is one filled with excitement and careful maneuvering, but ultimately it's something that works better when your opponent is already vulnerable. Boarding ships also requires the victim to be defenseless. The process works like you might imagine: players can buy a single use item and when within range,