Game:

Anvil of Dawn (1995)

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This is my playthrough of Anvil of Dawn for the PC, the first part, anyway. Enjoy! I'll link the second part, eventually.

Something falls from the sky one night, as a man clad in dark armor, known only as 'The Warlord' gathers the monsters and spurned humans of the land of Tempest, declares war from the land of Desolation. The old one, the sage Azariah, sees The Warlord and his schemes within a dream, and he and The Lady have called forth five champions to venture into Desolation, to learn of the Warlord's dark powers, and to destroy it, if they are able. Four head out bright and early in the morning, but for the player character, Azariah has different plans...

Anvil of Dawn was developed by Dreamforge Intertainment and was designed with the goal of being completable with only using the Left Mouse Button, and you can certainly do that. However, regardless of how you were designed to do it, I prefer to use Mouse AND Keyboard when I play games like this. Just feels more natural, you know? This did lead them to reduce the number of HUD elements on the screen and to only allow a single character instead of a party.

Another goal that the design team had for Anvil of Dawn was to make the game feel immersive as well as focusing on the atmosphere. They wanted to make the game feel seamless and that's why, in the outdoor sections where the player moves between dungeons, they will move along mini-animated movement nodes. It looks pretty good, but for me, at least, it's easy to get confused and lose track of the trail that you're supposed to be moving along to get to the next dungeon. Interesting feature, all the same, though.

In the dungeon crawling segments, combat plays something like a mix of turn-based combat and action-based combat. If you will recall back in the Eye of the Beholder trilogy (EotB 1:    • Game Playthrough #1 - Eye of the Beho...  ), (EotB 2:    • Game Playthrough #2: Eye of the Behol...  ), (EotB 3:    • Game Playthrough #3 - Eye of the Beho...  ) whenever one of your characters attack or did an action, usually, there was some sort of cooldown for it. In Anvil of Dawn, whenever the player attacks an enemy, then the enemy will immediately enter a counterattack. They have a wait interval, though, so they only attack at set intervals unless the player attacks in which they will counterattack and return to their waiting interval, meaning that the play can make the combat as fast or as slow as they like. I think I prefer the combat of this game to Eye of the Beholder, though.

The music in the game is just beautiful, and it's one of the best things about this game, I think. It was composed by George 'The Fat Man' Sanger, and it's all just so gorgeous, although certain areas music sounds rather off for the area that it plays at, case in point, The Dark Lantern. Still, I like the music.

As for replay value of this game, you have five characters and you get to choose which one is the main character of your playthrough. They each have different stats and therefore play as a different character class in other RPGs, for example, Brice and Nalu are Fighters, pure and simple, Ianmyrth is the Mage, Foxwen is the Thief, and the odd-one out is Daganoth, who has equal stats across the board. You can alter each of them, however, with editing their stats, although you only have ten points with which you can alter them with. So, even if you choose big burly Brice, who is a Fighter, you don't have to play him as a Fighter, you can instead play him as a Mage, if you so desire. The same thing goes for Shorty McWizard Ianmyrth. He is a Mage, but you don't have to play him as one, you can play him as a Warrior, if you so desire.

Now, with all that I've said above, you might think that I like this game, but you couldn't be more wrong. I hated it, almost every single second of it.

For example, remember how I said that Dreamforge wanted to focus on immersion and the enviroment? Well, they decided to make the world of Tempest a wasteland, so if Tempest is already conquered for the most part, and the world is already dead, why should I care about it? Another problem that I have with this game is the number of bugs and glitches that are prevalent. For example, for one God-forsaken reason or another, I lost my equipment chest a good bit of the way through the game, and I couldn't find it again, and I always take my stuff back with me whenever I get through with an area, if I can. I also don't really like how the player is forced to explore every square inch of the game. You could argue that it gives you more content, but dude, what if I don't want all that content? Especially with all the BS auto-movement traps in the game, which you will all see in the playthrough, both parts of it.

I just don't get it. This game should have been amazing, but it instead falls short in every sense of th,e word! I've played plenty of 80s-90s Dungeon-Crawler RPGs in my day, but this one, I just wanted to get through ASAP.

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