Dawn of Man

First off, I've never played this genre until now. The game actually gave me the same "need to survive" feeling the old Oregon trail game did. No crashes, bugs or glitches yet. I found the instructions well written. Tooltips and UI are modern. Controls make sense. At first the game seemed to be boring. But the snow set in, my people were suffering and a group of bears went on a killing spree. (Sad for my tribe, but at this moment I was glad I bought the game) I am investing technology in domesticated dogs, hope it will help protect me next time.

So not bad for what it is, but know what it is. Basically the normal game play is pretty low on the challenge level. The real player demands are in village lay out of buildings and needing to manually mange certain tasks the AI does not take care of well on its own. The basic frame work gives us so much automation of everything that it seems the player is able dial in the automation to be just right for their current sized and tech level village. Readjusting as group size and new tech changes the balance of situations. And then basically be on auto pilot for the most part, the player's direct input only being minimally needed for very specific situations. Like special hunting of dangerous animals. The AI will hunt basic animals decently enough on its own. But dangerous animals need the hunters to stay more well grouped up and more working as a team to take down such animals. And that makes the task more player manual input needed relative to how your unit's AI behaves. A sort of singular hunting AI based only around regular for food animals like deer and hogs and such. That is not going to work properly for the different situation of hunting dangerous animals. In general it seems deigned such that as long as a player does not try to race their advancement as fast as they can, then the challenge level remains fairly low over all. A few design choices seem to reveal a somewhat amateur design take on matters. For instance when you take control of the camera pan in game (mouse wheel button held down as is common in many games) you are still also controlling the game mouse cursor. The game should release control of the game cursor whenever the player is taking control of the camera panning motion. Too many examples in too many games for too long now, for an experienced designer to wind up with the implementation they released this game with. So not bad, but maybe not what you're looking for, if a meatier challenge is what you seek in a game.

This game reminds a lot of EoE, but it has far more details and much more beautiful. I spent more than 50 hours playing it in the last week. It makes you feel like playing again and theres a few scenarios and challenges. So I still have a lot to play. I managed to reach a population of 120 without problems. But I took 40 hours of gameplay to understand how it could be done while the society was organized. It has many flaws, though. Walls that won't connect depending on the terrain, watch towers than can be destroyed by men with bows and arrows (very very weak), a wooden wall that worths almost nothing, too few techs and you can't build more villages. The game engines undersyands everything as one village. So it doesn't matter if you built a whole other village, with its own walls, when you sound the alarm, people might run to the wrong places and raiders will easily destroy your paper made watch towers and walls. That was so frustrating! I think they might be going to upgrade the game. The concept is good, graphics are good, it's very stable and never crashed. Still, for the fun I had, I'm giving 3 stars.

Well- the game is quite interesting at first. I really liked it. It is basically a building sim for a tribe where your village becomes larger and larger. This is done quite well. But later in the game, exspecially when your civilization gows larger, I am of the opinion that the gameplay is flawed. I had about 50 inhabitants in my tribe and heavily invested in animal farming. When I could not feed humas nor animal due to winter conditions and no supplies, I tagged many animals for butchering- to at least get my people through the hard times- which wasn't done because the task queue was on 1400% and my clansmen had everything other to do than produce food... Rapidly, my population went down resulting in a game over allthough many pigs, sheep where tagged to be butchered ... Now I will wait if the next patchwill eventually fix this. I would suggest a priority setting where one could priortize certain tasks over others- so that the clansmen won't stick to shearing sheep totally forgetting about their need to feed themselves ... ;-|

Game been out for about 6 weeks and already being discounted. If that doesn't give you enough insight, read on. On the positive side, the graphics are great and the overall concept is good as well. But unfortunately, the game mechanics need a great deal of work. From not having hunting parties and sole hunters going out alone and usually getting kill, to the game being unable to control the number of domestic animals, to the difficulty in placing new building / carts due to not valid locations, this game just has too many issues for me to currently recommend. I sincerely hope there is a major revision sometime down the road as again, I loved the initial hype that surround this game.