A Look At Black Dawn Rebirth Box & Game

Black Dawn Rebirth from Double Sided Games have been a thing for a while now but I decided to wait with the article until I had actually given the game a proper go as normally I just do an unboxing/box review and then a review later if time permits it.

It is hard for me to admit this but I had no idea that there were several Black Dawn games and that they go all the way back to the early 90s, yes they are PD and Shareware games but I somewhat follow that too and not just the commercial games on the Amiga, anyways this is the 5th(?) game in the series and it is a reboot by the looks of things.

The first thing that hit me while booting this game up was how much effort they have put into the atmosphere and the actual mood, the intro sequence alone feels very well made and gave me more than enough incentive to play the game.

The game itself moved pretty much fluidly on my Amiga CD32 with TF330 but you can run it on just about every Amiga out there if you got at least 1.5Mb memory but the beefier machine you got the better it runs (feature-wise).

The graphics and music help set the theme for the game and this is the only negative thing (well, one of three anyway) I can think of and that’s the fact that there’s no in-game music in the game and this ruins some of the fun as it simply gets too quiet in the long run.

The vast amount of enemies and distinctive dungeons to visit is impressive for an Amiga game today, I mean they must have spent a crazy amount of time on it all and that certainly is a risk in the Amiga industry today whereas you never know if a game will sell or not.

The second and final gameplay annoyance I got with the game is the pointer, this is one of the things you see the most in the game and all you got is a standard lovely 1985 pointer… An animated pointer would have made a helluva lot of difference and if there ever is a sequel or a major update coming then such a feature would have been very welcome.

My final complaint is just the simple – why not support the CD32 community too with a bootable CD inside the box too? (yes, i know glass masters are expensive and most likely the reason, but ok what about a .iso online in the online shop account then?)

Ok, over to the actual big box release then.

Black Dawn Rebirth comes in a very stylish and glossy box with a front side that looks really good and according to my son (11) it was also very scary looking.

The beautiful box sets the mood for what you get in the game for sure and I can somewhat see that as both positive and negative in terms of expectations to the actual gameplay and style.

The backside of the box is also pretty good looking but for some reason, my pictures look “off” and while the box might not look new and mint here in the pictures it certainly looks fantastic in RL.

The manual got the same front image as the box and while it looks just as good on paper as it does on the glossy box. 

Brilliant stuff.

The manual ain’t thick or anything but with the few pages there is they certainly made it worthwhile with great design and print quality.

Black Dawn Rebirth comes on a staggering 6 Floppy disks and they look great too with their professional printed labels.

There’s also a map booklet included which is there so you can make your own map over the levels, just like we did back in the 90s before games had in-game maps. A great idea but I would never draw in a gamebook these days, I am a collector after all :p

Black Dawn Rebirth delivers on all premises really, a beautiful box, lovely manual and good looking floppies and best of all are that the game is not one of the more common genre/types the last couple of years either, oh and yes, it is a very good game too. Raster Wizards, ZSOFT and Double Sided Games have done a solid job here with delivering an RPG game that should and would make a lot of people happy.

The physical collector’s box edition was produced in a very low number (100) and sold out before the game even launched thanks to a pre-order campaign that lasted for half a year, luckily they are doing a second (and final?) production run now and as of right now there are only 28! copies left which means that if you want this game then hurry up and buy it right now, a direct link to the site can be found here.

I have included the teaser for the game below, enjoy.