Dawn of Man

i only played it for 4 hours. 3h learning the game and 1h just raging at the crappy AI. my hunters kill an animal only to walk back to base empty handed while the village (and even the hunters) are starving to death. if they do pick up a piece of meat they only take one, not using their full inventory. you can select a worker and manually assign tasks, except half the time they ignore the order... villagers will stand idle right next to a task that needs doing asap. calling this a finished game is insulting. and how can there still be a game in 2019 where you have to save and exit to main menu to change keybindings or something as basic as changing the sound volume???? are you serious? 20 years ago games didn't have this problem. no amount of pretty maps can get me to play a game with such flawed main mechanics.

The game is game is Banished like. It adds a bit more ease for micromanaging, when you have fewer people. I tend to play these games at the 1x speed and speed up every so often if there is completely nothing going on. So if you are someone who enjoys a slow pace, watching your civilization grow type of game where you kind of direct your attention to other things, but still enjoy yourself managing the outcome, this has a good number of hours of enjoyment. The UI is simple enough, the structue selection is intuitive and and is ease enough to learn. If you enjoy a relazing game like Banished, but want something a little different this is pretty enjoyable. I will say it does seem as though if you like to 8x through these type of games the content might feel a lot more limited, so keep that in mind.

I have enjoyed playing it for the first two hours as the gameplay mechanics seemed to work pretty well. But then the drag started where you more often waited than managed anything. Difficulty is starting a bit tough, then it tends to get easier over time, once you got enough man and animal power to handle any tasks. Managing the amount of animals or other produces is quite simple. The only nuisance is the increasing amount of enemies popping up with each wave and the stupidity of the own tribe's AI, where people went in a totally different direction than the actual position of the raiders. The game needs better controls for units. Since it doesn't offer much variety in terms of buildings, tech tree or types of produce / items, you can only play with higher difficulty and I don't know, how much that's going to change the overall experience. I'm not entirely disappointed, but also not very impressed either, therefore 3 stars.

The game is more of a show case, than a fully fledged title. It looks nice, it is stable, it has basic GUI an mechanics functioning more or less. But it doesn't lead to anything, nor it is fulfilling. You only have a couple of structures available, the tech tree is non-existant and is tied to a rather tiring grind of structures and resources. The work load chart is nice - but you can't do anything with it, because you have no control over your NPCs, which are also blank states forever. The pathfinding/AI issues are glaring on a longer run, and there's nothing rewarding for you if you decide to go along into the game. The gameplay does not evolve, there's no content pacing at all. Having a village with only 4 tents is the same as having a huge settlement with 100+ inhabitants. Your typical tribleman behaves exactly the same throughout the game - having nothing to wear or with a simple wooden spear, or being fully equipped wth a steel sword, spear, a bow, armor, and whatnot. They will still wander around occasionally hunting down an animal down, harvesting some crops or killing a raider, just like they did a few ages earlier. Maps are generic, there are no real scenarios to talk about, no missions nor challanges outside of maximizing the basic set of your stale raider/dangerous animal/weather counts. It's fun for a couple of hours, when you get to know the mechanics and making use of them. Then, you hit a wall of understanding there's nothing to do further, and the basic gameplay loop isn't enough to keep you involved. It's a solid base for a game, though. But it's just that base for now.

My biggest problem with the game is that it's too short. Just as when I started to have fun, the game is already over. As much as I actually like the game, as much as I want to give it 3/5, I'd be lying to you, so 2/5 is the best & honest score I can give. Again, I really love the game. I recommend you buy this game on a 50% or more discount ONLY. So basically, you run a stone age village. You expand your village, you hunt for food & gather resources, people will either join your or try to destroy you, you fulfill some conditions to get points to unlock tech so you can progress to a new era. You start from the early stone age & the end game is the iron age, the game gets less fun as you progress because there's no extra challenge to come along with it which is the historically authentic but it makes for a boring gameplay. By the end of the Iron Age & you managed to get steel tools, the game is on easy mode & the only "challenge" would be the marauding hordes trying to take you down. But you have steel swords & composite bows so they can't fight you. I would also recommend to put your village where you can geographically create choke points to maximize your kill zone potential because raiders can tear down your walls. It's almost as if the devs know the game is short, you'll run out of metals in your mine pretty quickly, so by the time of iron age you'll rely more & more on traders. You won't have a hard time finding things to trade with because you have plenty of tools you loot from dead raiders to trade with. If there's a game that need DLCs & expansions, this is the game. Other than that, this game is actually very beautiful to watch. So much so I wish there's a Wallpaper mode or Screensaver mode so I can watch my villagers living their lives while I work or do other stuff.