EARTH'S DAWN

My first few hours with Earth's Dawn kept pulling me back to a single nagging thought: this could have been so much better, and it still kept me playing anyway. One or Eight's side-scrolling action RPG drops you into a post-apocalyptic United States overrun by alien horrors called E.B.E., where you play as a bionic super-soldier in an elite unit called A.N.T.I. The hand-drawn art immediately signals Vanillaware DNA - think Odin Sphere filtered through a gritty sci-fi manga lens - and the moment-to-moment combat genuinely delivers. You can juggle enemies skyward, chain ground combos into aerial finishers, dash-cancel to extend pressure, parry incoming strikes with a sword-clash mechanic, and swap on the fly between two weapon loadouts once you unlock that skill. A two-handed broadsword into a one-handed saber and shotgun combo is a perfectly valid and satisfying approach, and the build space opened up by a large skill tree - covering stat boosts, ability unlocks like homing dash, immunity thresholds for burn and freeze effects, and air jump extensions - means there is a real character-building loop underneath the carnage. The crafting system reinforces that loop in the right way. Every enemy drops materials, and you use those to forge and upgrade swords, guns, armor, accessories, and cosmetic gear. Rare drops gate the best upgrades, which means some honest grinding, but the combat is enjoyable enough that farming runs rarely feel punishing until deep in the mid-game when gear-score walls start appearing before particularly aggressive boss encounters. The bosses themselves are the clearest highlight: large, pattern-driven creatures that punish button-mashing and reward learning their movement, with multi-phase designs that shift attack behavior once limbs are damaged or broken. Facing the Cerberus-type while targeting individual heads to strip its attack options is exactly the kind of design that makes you lean forward in your chair. Here is where the honest accounting comes in. Earth's Dawn is built around approximately seven maps squeezed into roughly a hundred missions, each loaded separately from a hub menu. The level geometry often looks like a Metroidvania, with branching platforms and environmental variety, but you are never allowed to roam freely. Every mission drops you in, points at an objective, and yanks you out. That structure gets repetitive fast, and the enemy variety cannot keep pace with the mission count. Re-skins and palette-shifted enemies fill gaps that new creature types should occupy. The story, told through static illustrated panels with Japanese voice acting and English text, is fine as atmospheric backdrop but offers little of real weight. A counteroffensive timer on the hub screen dictates when story missions unlock, which creates a natural rhythm of side missions followed by narrative progression, but the mechanical concept is more interesting than the content it paces. No co-op exists despite the three allied soldiers who follow you around the map and vanish the moment combat starts - a peculiar ghost of what might have been a scrapped multiplayer mode. Steam players rate it "Mostly Positive" and the community skews toward fans of 2D beat-em-ups, Dragon's Crown, and Monster Hunter-style loot cadences. Critics landed in middling territory - fair scores, not dismissals. The honest target audience is someone who already knows they love this subgenre and wants more of it without expecting refinement on the level of its Vanillaware inspirations. If you can tolerate repetitive mission structure and occasional difficulty spikes that feel disconnected from the gear progression that precedes them, the core combat and crafting loop will carry you through to the post-game endless missions mode where extra materials and weapon stat extensions wait. It is a game with a strong engine and a thin track to run it on.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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