In short. If you like RPG and semi-autonomous city building. This game will be addictive like cocaine for at least 8 hrs. Worth the price without a doubt.

Pros:
+ persistent progress of your avatar’s stats between campaign/custom games/skirmish maps.
+ Stats develop. Similar to Skyrim ability growths.
+ no level cap. It doesn’t even break the game… doesn’t make sense but I’m impressed.
+ your town is grown by your towns people even if you decide to go full Rambo.
+ gear/magic includes tier and upgrades.
+ artwork/sound is fine. Some may say sub-par, I bought a game not an orchestra ticket.
+ replay ability via campaign difficulty and skirmish/custom

Cons:
-Campaign can do with more content.
-As diverse as the tech tree is it could expand a bit more
-AI is a bit on the week side ATM
-Some form of memory leak? If you play for 5+hrs straight visual glitches start making UI/game elements invisible. Saving and restarting the game fixes it. The game does not lag however.
-I need more, if this had workshop integration it would be lining up for game of the year in the RTS & RPG genre, provided modders do their magic.
-Story has no voice over, I’m lazy so that’s a minus but a minor one at that.

Overall highly addictive and enjoyable game if you like progression. But very heavy on the time consumption so wouldn’t recommend for people who want a 10 min wonder, try Sacred 3.

A pure sandbox game allowing you to create your own avatar and use him again and again into whichever map you want with how many foes or allies you need.
Lots of items to craft, all with their own use. Same with the skills, some are situationnal and some are must have. And you're not limited because the avatar is persistent and can master everything in the long run, allowing you to tackle harder difficulties.

The creator keep on improving and tweaking the game and is responsive when a bug arise.

The game is completly playable with a campaign ( with 6 difficulties ), a survival mode ( you get a little time to prepare before the hordes appear in any number and waves you want ) and a skirmish mode ( with up to 7 IA controlled lairs or villages ).

As a con the game is repetitive and the difficulty in the campaign is just HUGE numbers of ennemies per waves ( even on the second difficulty you will get over 500 mobs on the lvl 18 or 19 map by the last wave ). And the only difficulty here would be to craft the right items to destroy the fastest mobs then take a HUGE amount of time to finish off the 400 or so useless zombies unable to kill you unless you fall asleep on the keyboard.
The IA of the villagers with you is ... lacking. They struggle to be anything else but some useless diversions littering the map most of the time. Then suddenly they awake and start to mass construct towers and golems and to spam the hordes with spells. Weird, would love them to be more consistent when fighting.

But despite that the game keep on improving and we can hope for some more control over them and maybe even some multiplayer in the future.

Nice concept to make you feel like you are part of a village. The only problem is it feels like a bunch of individuals instead of a community because there's no shared resources.

You need to find food? You gather it yourself. Need it cooked? You cook it yourself. Need clothes? You hunt the skins, sher the sheep, make the linen, sow it yourself. Need a weapon? Go mine, smelt, forge yourself.

So it's basically a solo survival game with a bunch of pets to help distract enemies.

UPDATE: Negative Review status is no longer accurate, but neither is recommend. Though I find it fun, I am nuetral toward this game. Mainly because a couple old bugs still havent been fixed that are quite annoying to me.

Keep in mind this game isnt finished. Id only buy it if you want to help beta test and support the developer financially. If you have read the negative reviews thus far, you will have found out that none of them even played beyond the tutorial campaign. Even in its current state the game is still surprisingly quite fun and addictive. EDIT:The game is in much better shape now. No more freeze ups or crashes(at least for me)

EDIT: The FPS issue seems to have been fixed.

The real meat of this game is custom survival games and skirmish games(vs other villages/monsters), either against the AI or with/against friends in multiplayer. The multiplayer part so far appears to be LAN only. But the dev plans to make it full multiplayer.(Skirmish is still a bit buggy) EDIT: Full multiplayer has been added and so far in my testing appears to run well. Crashes once in awhile.

Custom survival is that. Custom. You can create your own entire village of characters, though you can only control one at a time, but they will all be what you want, and all have whatever names you give them. You set timers for events and how hard you want it to be. The maximum time so far is up to aprox 16.5 hours with 99 waves of enemies. Starts out rather easy but after a dozen waves or so you will be screaming for mercy as the types of enemies you face get stronger and stronger, possibly more numerous, depending on the settings you choose.

Apparently the game is recording every change to characters in real time. Every skill, every level up is saved as it happens. Your custom made villagers never stop gaining experience and levels. They retain all their gained skill levels forever and have them in every game you play. One of the achievments you can get is to have a character at or over level 1000.(exp gain has been slowed down alot it seems, so getting this achievment will take quite a awhile)

Each villiger has a ton of skills and abilities. Each one goes up when you use them. Each villager will focus on a set of skill and abilities based on their AI preset. EDIT: Your villagers now get perks, based on their race/career choice(I think) and you unlock new perks as you level up.

Skirmish mode is also totally customizable. You can create a custom village just like with custom mode. You can play with up to 10 villages on a map(or monster dungeons), but you can only control one villager at a time, always. You are, however, able to group up and give commands to hired mercenaries and constructed golems and battle machines in order to conduct organized attacks/defenses. If you do not control them, the AI simply has them do whatever it wants. There is no diplomacy. Everything is out to get you and each other.(You can set allies up before the game starts though)

The AI isnt that great right now. EDIT:It has been improved greatly since I wrote this. You can now create and customize your own AI pre sets. Syl has already made pre set AI scripts for each kind of villager career type and are used as default, but you can modify them all you like.

Despite the game being unfinished and with issues, it is still incredibly fun and engaging. If all you play is the tutorial campaign and you think that is the game, then you would be mistaken and go to write yet another ill informed negative review. (EDIT: There is a new tutorial campaign that is much better than the original)

There is only 1 person developing this game, so progress is quite slow. Only buy this game if you want to help out with development, giving feedback, bug reports and ideas. Its gonna be a long slog until this game is ready for release. EDIT: Game has now been released. Though there are still a few very old bugs present... The game is quite playable.

EDIT: Syl has been diligently working on this game every single day and updating it frequently the entire time Ive had this game, about a year and a half.. He is always checking the forum for bug reports and even occasionally responds to posts.

The game has improved significantly since I wrote this review. New content and several bugs/issues fixed. I am very close to changing this to a recommend review, but not quite yet. There are still a couple of annoying bugs happening in skirmish mode.

Really neat game that I recommend. I passed it up for awhile because the graphics didn't appeal to me. Steam kept popping it up as similar to other games that I liked and then a friend of mine said "I need to try it.". I really like it and have had great fun playing it.

The bad -

Not much bad. I wish there were more graphics options, character models, faces, outfits, etc. There needs to be many more skirmish maps and more options to customize the skirmish games. Even more stuff - building types, weapons, etc. There are 100's of things to make as is but more would be better. More dungeons + NPC monster factions in skirmish mode. There doesn't seem to me to be a great variation in the different races, I'd make the variations bigger to really make the race you chose more important. It needs cloud saves.

The Good. - It's fun. Your character can be anything they want and if you want to play something else just start working towards it. Like if you are a mage type and decide you want to be a knight, make some armor and weapons and start melee fighting..
Awesome sandbox skirmishes. I made suggestions to improve them above but even as is they are great fun. I haven't played co-op but it'd have to be great. I didn't encounter any bugs, in free camera mode the camera sometimes doesn't want to move when I mouse to the edge of the screen but it'll end up moving so more of an annoyance than a bug, other than that no issues. It's a small download.

I know I didn't write my most detailed review here but I like the game. For me to like a game with this type of graphics says a lot because if you look at what I normally like it doesn't look like this. Besides there is a demo. I didn't play the demo so I'm not sure how much it shows but I'd imagine it'll be fun enough no matter how limited it is. It won't be my favorite game of all time but even after I beat all of the campaign missions on hard levels, I'm sure I'll still play a skirmish from time to time. For me that's a tremendous value as 99% of games after I complete them I never go back. I hope they add to it and I'll be watching their future games.

summary = Thumbs up - try this game.

I hemmed and hawed a lot about this one but I finally decided I wouldn't recommend this game as it is. However, I would highly recommend that whoever is interested in the game play the demo available and see for yourself. The game is recently out of early access and will likely be developed a lot further.

Overall, I appreciate what the developer was trying to achieve, and I think it's really impressive that they've created a whole game by themselves, I just think that the different features need further development in order for it to fully represent what they're describing it as. I think the screenshots and gameplay videos are a little misleading as to the level of world customization and how sandbox the game truly is.
I'll definitely keep tinkering with it, but I kinda wish I'd played the demo before I purchased the game.


Pros:
+ The artwork, although a little amateurish is cleanly integrated, endearing and suits the vibe of the game

+ I think the visuals are pretty nice, and each sprite looks cute and detailed

+ Interesting character levelling system with lots of different skills (no level cap!)

+ Multiplayer feature (although I haven't tested it out, the potential to play with your friends is always a bonus

+ Neat progression ideas, going from wood to steel and having magic incorporated along the way

+ Ability to create fully custom games

+ Fun if you want to fool around and watch waves of mobs be killed

+ Customizable computer AI

+ Has a lot of potential to be a really fun game

Cons:

- The main menu and font used is really unfortunate to look at and cheapens the game

- Visual glitches and bugs when playing for a long time

- Difficult to share resources among the characters you control, which is annoying if you want them all to collaborate on a building.

- Despite there being customizable AI, there's no explanation as to how this works, so it's a pretty steep learning curve; this leads me on to:
- The CPU villagers are STUPID. If you have non controlled villagers rather than extra companions with your character, be prepared for them to place buildings wherever they like and basically progress the game for you.

- The campaign isn't exactly new and exciting, and it is presented as a tutorial for you to understand the different items and buildings in the game. I don't particularly like this because it cheapens the campaign story and doesn't really explain how the different modes and things work when creating your own game.

- The 'sandbox' element is tentative- the AI places buildings for you if you have them and the progression is fairly linear. Also:
- All of the maps are premade, and there isn't much difference in terrain types apart from the rocky looking brown bits that slow down units. You can't even place your own paths since they're also premade into the maps.

- The entire game reads as a tower defence, but if you have the aid of CPU villagers, there's no real strategy element because they'll throw down your towers anywhere they please.

- If you don't have the aid of CPU villagers, the game is SLOW. There's no way to scale down how many materials you need to create a building depending on how many characters are present meaning actually building things is like pulling teeth sometimes.

- After a few games, it gets pretty repetitive. With there being no real need to create certain buildings or items to beat the mobs it just feels tedious and samey.

- The Ether age feels pretty disjointed from the rest of the evolutions. It is the only stage you need crystal for, which is also (in my opinion) the most tedious resource to get (Gold age isn't much better)

- The servants you can buy are so useful for collecting resources, but I feel like they are lacking development. It'd be great to be able to assign them different roles or choose what resource you want them to collect rather than, again, leaving it up to what the computer wants to do.

Aurora Dusk has a lot of content and a unique playstyle for the pricepoint. At $9.99 ($8.49 currently on sale) it's a wonderful value.

I wish more games did what Aurora Dusk does, which is lets you create your own character and build a town and fight other towns. It's simple, it works, and it's great. You can either do everything yourself, or have NPCs helping you out. I haven't delved too far into the campaign, but I look forward to doing so once I've had more of a fill of the skirmish mode and trying different things out.

Have to say that this was a very nice enjoyment of a game.

first off let me tell you that I love both 4x and god games (where you have the power to do whatever you want)

The twist that you are just ONE of the citizens is enjoyable. they do things that can both hinder and help your plans, just like the first come first served mentality. wish you could dismantal buildings though, or target enimies buildings that you can use as a kind of superfuge.

The game however is enjoyable for the story yet not really that replayable, outside of difficulty just getting more and stronger enimies per level. I do however wish I could convince my friends to pick this game up so I could test the co-op or vs modes in multiplayer.

With a little more pollish, and maybe some graphics overhall due to the RPG/game maker feel, this game could be one of the best games in the city builder/god genre

*Tip to creator if they read these*
Placing other modes into the non story modes would be better. another plus would be to control your AI builds for citizens (like having the same option you have for your made characters)

I bought this game yesterday for the $7.00 sale and have 31 hours as of posting this. Certainly feel I've already gotten my moneys worth and really hope this game continues to grow in content and perhaps have a sequel one day.

PROS:
~Almost everything you do lvls up a skill; farming, woodcutting, everything... character creation gives you a bonus in certain things but even a dwarven tank with armor making occupation can master magic, farming, or w/e just depends on how much you use it.
~The sheer amount of skills is staggering.
~Building and crafting: there is so much!
~You can recruit an army, yes an army of NPCs you pay for by selling resources, just awesome haven't seen that in a game before.
~Graphics: It's defidently oldschool as am I, reminds me of suikoden.
~Customization: Below I explain cons, the AI customizations allow you to try and balance the fights better. From age progress speed to population amount you can customise alot.
~LAN multiplayer: Been playing with wife and we both enjoy the game together, not sure(but hope) we can be against each other but she likes the team play better anyway.

CONS:
~AI is dumb; ally and enemy AI alike will sometimes attack towers with no hope of destroying it and be killed in the process, if it's the ally you're forced to keep making resurrection totems to revive them so they'll do it again over and over or just let them stay dead.
~Ranged attacks way too OP for dumb AI; Ranged missiles(darts, arrows, etc.) move very slow, this allows you to literally dodge enemy missile attacks, but land your shots everytime becouse AI don't dodge. As for melee they're usually slower and you can kite them, run shoot run shoot until they flee or die.
~Difficult to make challenging: Me and my wife by ourselves(no npc allies) at 10% age increase speed against 4 opponents with 6 population each at 25% age increase speed, and +10% power offered no challenge. Basically 2 vs 24, they have increase dmg and unlock new tech way faster and we stomped them. Huge part of this is how easily a bunch of defence towers make enemies just melt as you go about working on w/e.
~Tutorial is too fast paced: You're basically thrust into missions that slowly progress through the ages, which allow you to build new things as you go. Sadly you have up to 5 minutes to prepare each lvl which is barely enough time to harvest some resources and make a little gear before the attack, let alone time to explore the new buildings, and things you can craft. Don't be too discouraged by this, the other game options such as skirmish will provide you ample time to learn all aspects of the game.

Conclusion:
I really enjoy this game and recommend it to anyone that likes crafting/building games ESPECIALLY if you have a friend you can play LAN with. I really hope the dev can make the AI more challenging becouse right now it's so easy to exploit there weakness which is inabiliy to dodge missiles while I can. Hope this helps you potential buyers.

~Updated Review 5/27/18~

~Town Centers have been added which act as a tower and start progress toward next age
~Tutorial has been modified and works much better for new players
~AI much smarter and even attack you in waves
~Something I didn't mention in origional review which was in game at the time... you are able to setup custom AI controls for your own character which is pretty much what I do now days

Still loving the game 600 hours later and cant wait for more updates <3

A game for those who enjoy grinding and farming, Aurora Dusk is all about creating your Avatar and then leveling up dozens of skills in any order you want! Choose from over a hundred pieces of equipment you can craft and build the Avatar you want!

Very much a sandbox game, you can choose from various game modes and your Avatar can be used across all of them - keeping all your skills and levels. From Necromancy to Baking to Golem-building, you'll have no shortage skills to level up and advance!