There’s a genre of lesser fun that only makes itself known to me once I’ve completely given up on enjoying a game in any traditional sense, lurking under the surface like a silly icon on a losing scratchcard. I’ll call it ‘system tourism’ in lieu of something better. It’s not like the actually fulfilling virtual tourism you might do in something like Yakuza’s Kamurocho, where you’re scarfing down deep fried whiskeys, entranced by the lights. It’s more like doing a Google street view tour of Venice’s canals to see if you can spot someone taking a leak off the side of a gondola – hunting for anarchic anomalies because, honestly, the sights just aren’t grabbing you.
At the risk of sounding like some sort of horrible joy-mathematician: My experience with open world zombie survival game Dread Dawn involved precisely two and half discrete instances of fun, plus some additional appreciation for a few genuinely good ambient bits I’ll get into shortly. With a significant overhaul of basically every player interaction Dread Dawn offers – from the abysmally tedious looting to the rusty combat – it might some day be worth your time. It harbours some incredible ambition, though it’s surrounded by murk and detritus, like a dictatorial rat in a toilet bowl. Mostly, though, I can only give you advance warning to avoid it.
I’m a big fan of advance warnings these days, actually, after being given none by the fighter jets that occasionally decided to carpet bomb the streets I was running down and instantly burned me to death…
It all started so promisingly, too. I’m hiding out in a school filled with other survivors following a garden variety zombocalypse, and the way the isometric camera pans over the corridors – full of sleeping bags and makeshift fires – feels urgent, almost desperate. What’s really incredible here is the soundscape: a chaotic, filthy melange that transcends clear audio design to deliver something I’d imagine is pretty close to how your terrified ears would actually translate a shart show of this magnitude. It’s all alarms and panicked chatter, flames lapping and dogs fitting in the distance. Sometimes there’s sobbing, shrieking – individual and collective anguish. It sounds like refried hell, and it’s Dread Dawn’s best feature by quite a way.
My first task is to go check on my character’s sister in the girl’s dorm. On the way, I run into one of several footballs scattered around and accidentally pelt it at a dude lying on sleeping bag, who then jumps up and follows me around for about a minute, knocking me to the floor every time I get up. I’m not sure if this was a quirk, or a sly tutorial on aggroing other survivors, but the game’s full of hints at this sort of systemic messiness (complimentary). They never really amount to much, but they do occasionally bubble to the surface, threatening an interesting scenario before popping into nothingness.
Along the way to the dorm, I loot a few bookshelves. Looting is such a monkey’s paw here. The stuff you find is intriguing, but the act of acquiring it is a real pain. The result is one of Dread Dawn’s worst features sitting next to an otherwise interesting time, like a marauding bus farter plonking themselves down next to you just as your book’s getting good. Itemisation is where the game most closely resembles something like Dead Rising, letting you load up on mostly useless, but inspired bric-a-brac to inhabit the sort of dude who collects marbles and rocks and pots full of stationary to throw at zombies when in possession of a perfectly okay gun. At one point, you get a skateboard. It’s good for about five minutes until you realise the streets are too crowded to avoid knocking into zombies and subsequently sampling pavement every few minutes, but hey, at least it made me grin. I’ll take what I can get.
There’s just too much stuff, though, and looting both containers and corpses takes a slow-cooked eternity. Trying to pixel hunt individual deaduns from a slain horde is a nightmare, and containers impose a brief loading bar on you before you get inside. Inventory space is limited, so ‘loot all’ soon becomes useless, meaning you’ll spend a lot a time dragging items. The worst thing, though, is the unavoidable FOMO. Dread Dawn’s economy is bizarre, with $800 cooked chickens and $200 guns, so you end up wanting to shove everything in your pockets in case it’s useful later, but this slows things to a crawl. I ended up feeling pang of anxiety for each zombie I didn’t loot. Sometimes, that meant around 80 pangs of anxiety. That’s at least two pings of anxiety! It hangs over you, resulting in exploration that mainly inspires regretful second-guessing.
Anyway, a bit of oddly translated dialogue later, and I’m out in the open world, following red arrows to find my sister (you get main quests and side quests, and occasionally you’ll have to stop what you’re doing to run back to the school and see off a wave of zombos using the defences you’ve built up). To pass through one street, I have to get past around fifty zombies. The hordes in Dread Dawn are massive, although easily avoidable due to their tendency to follow a single leader and bunch up behind you once you’ve got their attention. Thing is, the game doesn’t really tell you this, so I spend longer than I’d like to admit looking around for an alternative solution. At this point, I’m armed with a screwdriver. I find a pistol soon after, and learn that it’s actually less useful in terms of stopping power and damage than the screwdriver. If this suggests the screwdriver – or any melee weapon – is enjoyable to use: they aren’t. You’ve got a quick stab that zombies barely flinch from, or a ponderous heavy that does the job, but feels awkward and limp.
I’ll skip to the conclusion here by saying this: once you realise the writing in Dread Dawn isn’t interesting, the crafting and tower defence stuff is rote, and the exploration is painful, all you’re really left with is the appeal of killing lots of zombies: Name me ten zombie games, and I’ll show you ten better ways to spend your time killing zombies.
Strangely enough, I’d have a hard time showing you ten better water hoses, though. I… don’t know what happened here, really. It’s not like you encounter these hoses very often. They’re conveniently placed near fires, as you’d expect. They’re also just oddly better than anything else in the game, snaking around obstacles and squirming as you carry you them. You can control the intensity of the blast, and it’s just plain satisfying to quench flames. This should have been the game, Dread Dawn! Just call the water ‘zombie killing juice’ and give your character a backpack full of it and a permanent hose weapon. That would have been good!
Unquenchable, unfortunately, are those carpet bomb fires I mentioned above. You’ll occasionally run into fights between the military and zombie hordes. You’ll snake your way through, maybe jump behind a turret for a bit, leave towards your objective, then bammo! Bombs out of nowhere. The initial bombs don’t hurt, just knock and stun you. It’s the ensuing flames that do it. The autosave is quite generous, and thank zombie Shakespeare. Stupid deaths included zombies being right on top of me when I loaded into a new area, and certain spots en route to a critical objective suddenly being full of hostile gun turrets with no warning and also being right next to an area filled with friendly turrets. There are right ways to make a world feel dangerous, and these aren’t it.
A couple of caveats to round out, then. I didn’t come close to finishing Dread Dawn. I hit a point where my only way forward was to run back and forth for fifteen minutes luring a massive horde twelve-at-a-time to a machine gun placement. This is roughly where I started finding the game physically painful to play, so I stopped. I feel much better now. Thanks for asking.
Secondly, I’m not a fan of gathering wood and rocks at the best of times. After chopping down my first tree, I wrote down “I would rather be waterboarded with a cloth made out of woven pig nipple hair and a bucket of rat sick.” I don’t actually mean that, but the chopping is both lusterless and very slow. It’s such a core interaction and Dread Dawn couldn’t even manage that. If you’re a die-hard survival glutton, and you wait a while for updates, you might find some fun here, since the framework does have those tiny sparks of playful ingenuity I’ve alluded to. Otherwise, uh: game bad. Don’t buy it!