Dawn of Magic

Dawn of Magic, on iPhone. Don't let this picture deceive you - the actual game graphics are pretty horrible.
Source: www.iphone-screenshots.com

I have been a fan of RPG (role playing games) since young, so naturally, I do look out quite a bit for RPGs on the iPhone. A few months ago, a colleague recommended Dawn of Magic to me. It was free, so I downloaded it and started playing it without much thought.

After a while, I started to wonder why I was even playing this game. The plot is mediocre, the graphics are poor. The translations need a lot of improvement, the controls are clumsy, and the game mechanics suck. They have an experience cap on enemies, so if you fight enemies that are too low level, you get only 1 experience point... and no gold. If you run out of gold and your main characters reach the level cap (which is pretty low), too bad - there's no way you can earn money. Except by paying real cash for it. And the experience you get depends on the lowest level character you have in your party, which makes it pretty unbalanced. All these show a lack of effort in designing the game mechanics.

But I haven't mentioned the worst yet - it's the music. They obviously didn't pay much attention and resources to music, because it was of low quality (sounded like some 16-bit midi music. Hey, this is 2011, not the 1980s!) and poorly composed. After a while, I switched off the music because it was definitely doing more harm than good to the enjoyment of the game.

The best word of advice for RPG fans - stay clear away from Dawn of Magic. There are definitely much better alternatives out there.