| Dread Dawn | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Dread Dawn is an open-world sandbox survival game set in an undead-infested city. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Dread Dawn Review Overview
What is Dread Dawn?
Dread Dawn is a top-down, open-world sandbox survival game where you play as a student stuck trying to survive in the ruins of a city under quarantine due to a spreading zombie virus. Caught unaware by a sudden surge of undead during one stormy night on your college campus, you must use the materials and methods available to you to survive long enough for help to arrive. Will your amateur defenses hold against the undead tide, or will you be joining their ranks before long?
Dread Dawn features:
⚫︎ Dedicated crafting and crafting skill system
⚫︎ Minor base-building mechanics
⚫︎ Low-poly, Project Zomboid-style graphics
⚫︎ Minor survival mechanics like hunger and sanity
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Dread Dawn's gameplay and story.
 Steam |
$19.99 |
Dread Dawn Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Survivor Mode is Salvageable |
Half-finished Features Everywhere Monotonous and Unsatisfying Barely Any Content to Speak of Buggy and Unoptimized |
Dread Dawn Overall Score - 36/100
Dreadful. There’s truly no better word to capture Dread Dawn’s painfully subpar execution across its limited features. This shambling, barely functional excuse of a game not only adds nothing to a genre already gasping for air but actively lowers the bar for other zombie survival games. With clunky controls, a story so nonexistent it’s laughable, and a painfully drawn-out tutorial, the whole experience is as pleasurable as an actual zombie apocalypse. It’s a barebones, soulless ordeal that can hardly even be called a game, much more a good one.
Dread Dawn Story - 2/10
The problem with calling Dread Dawn’s story "bad" is that at least a bad story sticks with you. What this game offers, however, is a half-baked narrative that barely qualifies as an outline, let alone an actual plot. Honestly, I would’ve been fine if Dread Dawn skipped the story altogether, especially since zombie survival games don’t always need one. Instead, I was subjected to a lifeless checklist of every cliché in the zombie apocalypse playbook, delivered through uninspired dialogue, flat characters, and world-building so bland it’s almost insulting.
Dread Dawn Gameplay - 2/10
Dread Dawn’s gameplay feels like a haphazard collection of mechanics thrown together by someone with only a loose understanding of what open-world zombie survival should be. Many systems are either poorly explained or hampered by frustratingly clunky controls—or worse, both—making playing less of an immersive experience and more of an endurance exercise. Every interaction feels like a punishment, as if the game is daring you to push through its awkward design.
Dread Dawn Visuals - 7/10
The visuals in Dread Dawn are its one faint saving grace, offering a more detailed and polished take on the overhead view popularized by Project Zomboid. While it's not groundbreaking or particularly eye-catching, in a game that lacks charm in every other department, the decent visual design stands out as its closest thing to a redeeming quality.
Dread Dawn Audio - 6/10
I can’t say much against Dread Dawn’s audio—it’s one of the game’s few redeeming features. The sound design is competent, and the ambient noises, like the choppy groans of the infected, complement the game’s visual tone well. However, there’s no music to break up the monotony, and after a while, the repetitive sounds of rain, shuffling zombies, and endless running start to wear thin, becoming more of an annoyance than an asset.
Dread Dawn Value for Money - 1/10
Don’t waste your money on this game. Sure, it’s only $20, but that’s $20 you’d deeply regret spending. There’s hardly anything enjoyable here, and I struggle to imagine the type of player who could find satisfaction in its clunky, poorly explained mechanics. For the same price, you’re far better off buying Project Zomboid, which offers a vastly superior experience in every way for the exact same price.
Dread Dawn Review: Just Plain Dreadful
Every so often, a game comes along that's so bad and forgettable that it doesn’t even deserve the attention of its own failure. High-profile disasters like Concord and Redfall at least crash and burn in the spotlight, but a game like Dread Dawn? It slips into oblivion without so much as a whisper. There's honestly not much more to say, so let’s dive straight into what makes Dread Dawn so downright dreadful.
I would’ve started where most zombie stories begin—at the outbreak of the infection. But since Dread Dawn barely has a story, let’s kick things off with the tutorial instead. Simply put, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing. It’s overly long, barely teaches the mechanics, and does nothing to move the already non-existent plot forward. The tutorial drags so much that I can easily see players quitting before they even finish, missing out on the rest of the game—not that there’s much worth sticking around for anyway.
As you trudge from one objective to the next, it quickly becomes obvious that Dread Dawn has little to offer in terms of engaging gameplay or captivating story moments. You're essentially ticking off every cliché from the zombie apocalypse playbook, all while enduring a painfully slow and uninspired introduction to the game's core mechanics. Overall, the tutorial sets such a low bar that it’s hard to believe this game made it to release in its current state.
Yet, release it did, and Dread Dawn does have a few gameplay mechanics worth going over. The overarching goal of keeping the infected at bay is present throughout, and while the mechanics try to reflect that, they just don’t land. Whether they were poorly conceived from the start or simply botched in execution, the outcome is the same: the game is barely playable.
The core gameplay loop revolves around exploration, resource gathering, and crafting defenses and tools. Similar to Project Zomboid, players can search for a wide range of materials and gear scattered in containers across the map. These resources can then be used to craft everything from weapons and healing items to defensive walls, traps, and even automated turrets.
While crafting is tied to your character's skill—unlocking more recipes as your crafting level increases—and is serviceable for the most part, the real problems start to emerge elsewhere. For one, there's no character creation at all. You can’t customize your character’s appearance, and worse yet, there’s no option to set up specializations or allocate skill points at the beginning. Not that you'd want to endure a second playthrough, but this rigid, one-size-fits-all start kills any chance of replayability the game could’ve offered.
Though functional, the crafting system is also woefully limited, with fewer than 50 recipes total, covering basic walls, turrets, farms, consumables, and weapons. While that number might sound decent, for an open-world zombie survival game, it’s a pitiful selection. Even worse is the game's atrocious UI, which is not only an eyesore but borderline unusable. The inventory system suffers the most from this poor design, as it's nearly impossible to tell what’s what or where anything should go at a glance, let alone in the heat of battle against the undead.
What’s truly baffling is that the developers included features like stack-splitting, auto-transferring items, and upgrading inventory space, but completely neglected basic necessities like dedicated gear slots or even a simple way to track the quantity of each item.
When it comes to gameplay flow, Dread Dawn is just as pitiable as it is in nearly every other aspect. The tutorial consists of little more than running from one point to another, triggering poorly written cutscenes, while the actual gameplay feels directionless, with no real motivation to keep players engaged. There’s simply no reason to play this game—it’s neither fun, compelling nor remotely thrilling.
Base-building is reduced to nothing more than slapping up walls, and the game’s unique POV eliminates any possibility of verticality, leaving you with a shallow, inferior version of Rimworld. Combat is a slog, offering little satisfaction or reward, and resource gathering is even more of a grind than in Albion Online. I will say the quick-search command, which allows you to search all undead in an area simultaneously, is a useful feature—but one semi-functional mechanic doesn’t make up for a game that’s otherwise barely playable.
One of the other mechanics that stands out in Dread Dawn’s sea of mediocrity is the system for commanding large groups. You can assign tasks to followers as you move in a herd formation through the city. It’s not groundbreaking, but it adds a layer of strategy—a stark contrast to your character's lackluster functionality as an individual. While this feature won’t salvage the game, at least it works, which is more than can be said for most of the experience.
Visually, Dread Dawn resembles a marginally more HD version of Project Zomboid, with more detailed environments and a less monotonous, more purposeful stage design. The audio is competent enough when it comes to sound effects, but there's no voice-acting and barely any music to set the tone. Together, these elements make up the game's only features that are average or slightly above average.
And that’s pretty much all there is to Dread Dawn. It barely functions as a game, with lackluster mechanics, limited content, no compelling narrative, and a lack of creativity in how the gameplay reflects its story. The presentation is okay at best, but the game overall feels like an early-access title—even though it’s officially not one.
In its current state, you won’t have any trouble finding a better game elsewhere. And with this one already dead in the water, there’s little hope for redemption, in undeath or otherwise.
Pros of Dread Dawn
| Things Dread Dawn Got Right |
|---|
|
Survivor Mode is Salvageable |
Survivor Mode is Salvageable
After completing the first chapter of Dread Dawn's Story Mode, you unlock Survivor Mode, which shifts toward a more familiar Project Zomboid formula. While there’s still no character creation or perk allocation, you do get to pick your player model and starting weapon. From there, you're dropped into a random spot on the map with a vague non-objective to see what's happening outside,
before diving into the full survival experience.
It feels strange to highlight the bare minimum as the game’s only upside, but here we are. Survivor Mode at least addresses the slow pacing and lack of narrative direction from Story Mode. There’s still a long way to go in terms of delivering genuinely fun gameplay, but you know what they say about journeys of a thousand miles—it all starts with a single step.
Cons of Dread Dawn
| Things That Dread Dawn Can Improve |
|---|
|
Half-finished Features Everywhere Monotonous and Unsatisfying Barely Any Content to Speak of Buggy and Unoptimized |
Half-finished Features Everywhere
What truly mars Dread Dawn's execution is how unfinished everything feels. Even with a detailed rundown of each feature, there's a nagging sense that something is missing. Base-building barely scratches the surface of what it could be, but given what’s available, a more in-depth explanation wouldn’t have made much difference.
The same applies to combat, exploration, and the group command mechanic. These ideas range from standard to mildly unique, but together, they just don’t click—and worse, they don’t seem fully realized. It’s as if the game stopped short of the finish line at every turn
Monotonous and Unsatisfying
To make matters worse, the features that Dread Dawn managed to implement are both monotonous and unsatisfying. The maps are just a bit too large to make exploration fun, and resources are just a bit too scarce to make micromanagement rewarding. While there’s some variety in the infected you encounter, along with hostile humans and a modest range of equipment, there’s little else to look forward to and hardly any reason to keep playing.
The UI only deepens this dissatisfaction, making the gameplay loop feel more like a chore. Honestly, there’s no real incentive to push through to the next tier of progression. At this point, I’ve seen enough.
Barely Any Content to Speak of
Another aspect that makes Dread Dawn a poor entry in the survival sandbox genre—especially in the zombie survival sub-genre—is its pitiful selection of craftable items and buildable structures. With fewer than 50 buildable items, it’s a weak showing for a game that’s supposed to thrive on creativity and resource management. Even if Dread Dawn somehow managed to make its gameplay tolerable, it still wouldn’t offer the depth or variety needed for a truly immersive experience.
Buggy and Unoptimized
To cap off Dread Dawn’s dismal performance, the game barely functions on a technical level. It’s so unoptimized that every time you boot it up, it prompts you to adjust your settings—right off the bat, signaling that the game is aware of its own shortcomings. When a game’s first interaction with the player is a suggestion to tweak settings as a workaround, that’s a red flag.
And the warning isn’t for show. The game frequently freezes, crashes, or takes an eternity to load if you don’t follow its instructions. Even if you do, it still manages to do all of the above. Frankly, it’s just not worth the trouble.
Is Dread Dawn Worth It?
Barely Worth Your Attention, Certainly Not Worth Your Money
Dread Dawn is simply not worth playing, period. It dares to charge the same $20 price tag as the vastly superior Project Zomboid, yet offers a pitiful selection of craftables, repetitive gameplay, and a dreadful story. Survivor Mode is marginally more tolerable, but by the time you unlock it, you’ll have played over two hours—just long enough to miss Steam’s refund window.
Save your time, money, and patience—this game isn’t worth any of them.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$19.99 |
Dread Dawn FAQ
How Do You Unlock Survivor Mode in Dread Dawn?
You can unlock the game’s Survivor Mode by finishing the first chapter of the game’s Story Mode, called "Apocalypse".
How Do You Equip Weapons in Dread Dawn?
To equip a weapon in Dread Dawn, you must put it in the top-most level of your character’s inventory. If you can see your character holding the weapon, then it has been equipped.
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Dread Dawn Product Information
 | |
| Title | DREAD DAWN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 1, 2024 |
| Developer | Kioop |
| Publisher | Kioop |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Action, Survival, Open-World |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Dread Dawn Official Website |
