Zynga Inc (ZNGA)

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ZNGA: DAWN OF TITANS A MONUMENT TO TECHNICAL,PROGRESS, A FEAST FOR THE EYES, IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND




with a pinch of his fingers, revealing citizens walking the streets, trees swaying in the wind, and light dappling across the dome of a central castle.


A tap on this castle instantly took us inside the building, without any loading. Inside the grand domed chamber was a room lined with columns. Light from the windows illuminated the center of the room and out of the darkness at the room’s edges came a huge creature. This was one of the titans...



DAWN OF TITANS EVEN LOOKS BETTER THAN MANY FULL-FAT AAA GAMES ON THE PC.

...IT LOOKS SO MUCH BETTER THAN OTHER MOBILE GAMES.





WWW.KOTAKU.CO.UK

Dawn of Titans is a Bottled Fantasy Kingdom in the Palm of Your Hand
By Julian Benson on 14 Dec 2016 at 4:33AM

Dawn of Titans is a multiplayer city builder with quick one-on-one battles you control in real time. In that respect it’s not a huge departure from a whole string of other games on mobile: Rival Kingdoms, Game of War, and Clash of Clans all offer similar styles of play. Each of them has its individualities but if you’re playing one then you don’t need to be playing the others. Dawn of Titans aims to shake players out of its competitors’ hands through the time-honoured tactic of doing what they do better, and looking absolutely stunning at the same time.

What encloses the familiar game structure, hiding these similarities, is that it looks so much better than other mobile games. Dawn of Titans even looks better than many full-fat AAA games on the PC.

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Throughout the demo I was often speechless at the detail on screen. Torsten Reil, CEO of the game’s developer NaturalMotion, started by showing me the kingdom view. This aerial view of a gleaming floating island covered in forests and grand buildings could be zoomed in on with a pinch of his fingers, revealing citizens walking the streets, trees swaying in the wind, and light dappling across the dome of a central castle.

A tap on this castle instantly took us inside the building, without any loading. Inside the grand domed chamber was a room lined with columns. Light from the windows illuminated the center of the room and out of the darkness at the room’s edges came a huge creature. This was one of the titans, beastly giants you can collect and train to fight for you on the battlefield or defend your territories as you expand your kingdom. Reil tapped through a carousel of titans, each immediately loading on the screen.

NaturalMotion is known for making unbelievably good-looking games for mobile. Its last game, CSR Racing 2 looked good enough to compete with Forza:

When Reil showed me one of the game’s battles, which happen whenever you attack another player’s territory, Dawn of Titans looked almost on a par with Total War: Warhammer:

Dawn of Titans is more simple, mechanically-speaking, than Creative Assembly’s grand strategy game, but NaturalMotion is stripping down and rebuilding the systems of real-time strategy for mobile instead of trying to port across what works on the PC. Instead of virtual buttons cluttering up the screen, you tap on any of the divisions of your army and drag a line towards the enemy unit you want them to attack. It’s simple, tactile, and works excellently on a tablet. Other touch commands give you a lot more control over the battlefield than I expected, especially as other mobile strategy games sidestep these issue entirely by making battles largely non-interactive after the setup phase.

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Dawn of Titan’s battles are designed to be fast, lasting on average just a few minutes. Tactics boil down to familiar rock-paper-scissor relationships with archers beating footsoldiers, footsoldiers beating cavalry, and cavalry beating archers. But many units within those three disciplines stretch their abilities further, with some offering a near-hybrid of unit types, dampening their weakness and strengths in favour of versatility. Choosing which soldiers to train back home and then composing new armies may not be enormously deep, but another layer of strategy between the battles themselves.

Reil also showed off a view of the multiplayer world map, a sea of floating islands. Each island is territory owned by another player that you can invade or ally with. Once in your control, those lands can be built up with resource-generating buildings and barracks to train more troops for your army. Again, this will be familiar to players of mobile strategy - the proven loop of build buildings, harvest resources, upgrade buildings, harvest resources, expand. Dawn of Titans just looks better while it does it.

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As this all suggests, Dawn of Titans is a free-to-play game with all the pros and cons that entails. The whole game can be played for free, including the single player campaign. Every titan can be unlocked and the free players can join alliances, fight in battles, and field armies as large as a paying player. However you will hit timers and resource walls that take time or cash to overcome and, as with every F2P strategy game, the lategame is likely to exacerbate this.

If you don’t mind that sort of model, and maybe even if you do, then you should take a look at the gorgeous Dawn of Titans. It might seem unsophisticated to be wowed by a strategy game’s visual side but, a decade ago, I was still playing Snake on an old Nokia. The pace of change in mobile is blisteringly fast and, while Dawn of Titans may not be the future, it stands as some kind of a monument to technical progress - a genuinely stunning feast for the eyes, a bottle world of incredible vistas, all bound-up in the palm of your hand.


Source:

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/12/14/dawn-of-titans-is-bottled-fantasy-kingdom-in-the-palm-of-your-hand