Sci-fi shooter game with anime stylings

TheDawn is a free-to-play action title for PC created by game developer Limited. It is a third-person sci-fi shooter that tells the story of a psychic and her hacker partner as they try to stop an army of robots and its A.I. overlord that aims to rule the world.

Similar to Tales of Arise and Scarlet Nexus, TheDawn features an art style that takes design cues from anime and manga. Its gameplay revolves around third-person shooting mechanics and mixes them with RPG-like skills and abilities to offer players a unique and varied combat experience.

Humanity’s last hope

TheDawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic world wherein artificial intelligence has become a predominant aspect of man’s life. It has gotten to a point where the robots have dominated and ruled over humans under its AI overlord named Blender. Here is where you come in as Maya, a psychic, and your hacker friend, Max, as you charge the “palace” and put a stop to the tyranny.

Combat in this game is a mix of third-person action shooters and skill-based RPG attacks. Enemy robots range from attack drones to agile ground troops, and tank-like units with plenty of firepower. Use your trusty laser rifle to take down the former, while utilizing your time-manipulation powers to deal with the latter. Stop time on a specific spot, accelerate through it, or turn it back to get back precious seconds. 

Fight waves of robots across various locations all over the city, from back alleyway encounters to surprise street rumbles, and epic battles against boss machines inside building complexes. Some things that need work would be the controls that feel unresponsive and imprecise at times. Also, performance definitely requires optimization as the game runs poorly even on PCs that feature good specifications and hardware.

Stop the AI uprising

All in all, TheDawn is an interesting game that combines fast-paced action shooting combat with tactical RPG-like skills. The result is a fun and engaging experience. The controls could be tighter, though, and it definitely needs more optimizations to improve overall performance. Hopefully, these things can be addressed as soon as possible. Nevertheless, this is still worth trying out, especially since it’s available for free.