Mobility Digest Review: A Knights Dawn for Apple Devices

I’m a gamer, sadly I don’t play nearly as much as I would like though. The iPod Touch is an excellent little media player, but I like it for the games really. Today for review I’ve got A Knights Dawn from a little company called Visionary X. The game is sort of like the popular tower defense style games, but this one has a bit more style to it. A Knights Dawn puts you as King in charge of your troops defending an area from your enemies while defending and expanding your territories to become King of it all. I like the game a lot, but it is a bit on the difficult side at times. The graphics are very nice, and gameplay is rather fast paced.

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Vendor: Visionary X

Price: $1.19

Overall Rating: 4.5/5

A Knights Dawn

Defense strategy brought to another level: Multilevel!
Be prepared for the ultimate Defense game experience!  "A Knights Dawn" offers brilliant graphics with full Retina support, hours of fun and tactical battles in multiple levels.  If you have been waiting for a multilevel defense game, then wait no more, here you get the full package!

Features:
-Original hand drawn, brilliant graphics
-Strategic multilevel defense game
-Six different units with a variety of capabilities
-Special attacks
-Upgrades for units
-A menu system that develops with you
-Dramatic original sound effects and voice
-Original Orchestrated Music
-Variable controls
-High Replay value due to different difficulties
-In game Achievements
-High definition graphics on the iPhone and the iPad
-Facebook integration

"A Knights Dawn" tells the story of a King and his long, hard path to power.  Together with his fearless companions and dedicated followers, he must free his homeland from the endless Hordes of evil Invaders.  Now its up to you to take the helm and lead your force to victory!

What’s in the Box?

It’s an app download so there is no box or contents, so let’s take a look at the menus.

When you first start up the game you’ll be greeted with a nice text and graphic cinematic giving you an intro to the story. The graphics are very nicely done.

The main menu is actually your base camp that will change and evolve as you progress in the game. It starts out as a basic and rather sparse camp, but can turn into a full-blown fortress if you do well. The menu offers choices for Achievements, Upgrades, Play, Profile and Help.

Achievements is self-explanatory, as you’ll progress you’ll earn them.

The Upgrades menu gives you options to allocate Honor Points to strengthen your troops.

The Profile option is rather obvious.

The Options are self-explanatory as well.

 

Impressions / Review:

When you press play you’ll be greeted with the area choices. When you start you’ll only have the first one open to play, as you complete levels or arenas more will open.

The difficulty levels open up as you play too. When you first start you’ll only be able to choose, easy or guard.

A Knights Dawn is a tower defense style game, but it’s different than the original style in that you play with stationary towers set already for you. They look like banners or flags. The playing field is actually rather large, you can zoom in and out to get a better view. At the top of the screen you’ll see the number of troops coming for you, the lives you have left and the gold you’ve earned by defeating opponents. The number of lives is actually how many enemy troops that you can let through your defenses before losing the level.

Here’s a few screen shots of game play:

There’s plenty of enemies to fight, and as you progress you’ll encounter more different ones. They start easy and get more difficult of course.

To place a unit you just press on the flag and depending on how much money you have different units might be available to purchase. You can choose from Knights, Magic Users, Swordsmen, Riflemen and a few others. Prices start from 10 gold coins and go up from there. You can also upgrade units while playing. To upgrade you just press on the existing unit and a new overlay will open with a choice to sell it, or upgrade it for a certain amount of gold coins.

Conclusion:

A Knight Dawn is quite a bit of fun to play I think, but it’s hard, really hard even while playing on the Guard or easy level. The main issue is that it takes a long time to collect coins which you need to purchase more warriors to defend your area. You only start with a very limited amount of money, you can basically just purchase one unit to start with. You have to hope that one unit can kill enough enemies quickly to make you money to defend your area.

The graphics are excellent truly, they’re hand drawn with care and expertise.

There is quite a bit of replay value in that you’ll want to keep playing to see how your camp will expand. You can also go back and play more on the different levels.

The sounds are well done too, combining music, effects and even voices to make gameplay that much more enjoyable and engaging.

 

 

Pros:
+Addictive gameplay

+Great graphics

+Takes a long time to finish

+Ability to upgrade troops

 

Cons:
-Can be difficult

-Takes long to collect points to upgrade