Dawn of Man

After 170 hours played and all achievements unlocked I am giving this game 5 stars. Even if the mechanics are simple, trade items not balanced in value and villagers sometimes having to be manually told to do things correctly.. I spent hours upon hours playing this game and it was fun. Then at the end I finally got it - this game doesn't try to be a complex and balanced 4X game - it is a relaxing, nice looking game with some simple challenges to learn and overcome.

I've racked up about 25 hours in this game over the past two weeks and now.... I couldn't even imagine playing it ever again, there is nothing left to do in a game that feels like it should be huge. After advancing through a few ages (which will take you a good amount of time) the last few ages just breeze by and suddenly you are just sitting there with you town going... I guess thats it then. There is a more challenging mode which is completely boring, instead of making the game more challenging it just makes the tedious parts of the game even more tedious. There are some special modes in the game where you control animals and do other things which are totally out of place and utterly uninteresting. I got totally hooked when I started this game after seeing my friend play it and I almost feel like I've been cheated now with that price tag, where is all the content? Most of the tech upgrades are lacklustre and do next to nothing, there is no reason to explore the map, the raiders are pathetic, the trader essentially becomes a cheat code where you can buy all the tech in the game without getting tech points, you can plant different crops but the differences between them are negligible. It honestly feels like this game is in its beta stages and is still nowhere near a finished product. Also, this low graphic game causes my 2019 macbook pro to lag like nothing else in the world, I use this thing for music production and 3d modeling and it has no trouble, what is with the way this game has been thrown together? I'm talking even in the main menu I can barely do another thing on my computer when this game is open, I'm running it at the lowest graphics and lowest resolution possible.

It is easy to get into Dawn of Man and play about 10 hours. Time pass without notice. But then it looks that everything possible to do was done, and without much effort. Wondering about the replay value, especially with the other said "challenging" modes. Also, while the game mechanics are convenient with a small crowd, when you have more than 100 people, it get to simplistic to make sense. You get no way to really prioritise tasks, but even your crowd does not. You would assume that people does not forget to eat or produce food. Aside from that, I've read comments mentioning bugs or crashes. I had none.

Being set in a period I find very interesting I thought I'd get this after some favourable early GOG and Steam reviews. It's certainly fun and quite relaxing, being somewhat a combination of Banished and Populous the beginning (without the shaman). You could think of it as a prequel to banished in many ways as it ends where banished begins. The only real issue I've had is it's not really hard enough as the systems are really quite simple. You can go hours of gameplay without really worrying about food as you have direct control over your people. In banished you built systems and then if they weren't good enough your people die. In this if your systems aren't great you can just drag select everyone and get them to go hunt a Mammoth. I'd say this direct control is in fact the only problem with the game. I shall try in hard mode later to see if the difficulty is increased and so negates this. All in all though it's a great game with great music, servicable graphics, very stable (no crashes at all yet) well priced and great fun. If you like games like populous or banished then this is for you

First up, the delevopers are very active in the forums and take serious note of what people say. So it's always worth making a comment. The game itself starts you off with a few people, some tools and a couple of tents. From there you can build a village of 200+ people over several eons. You start with stone and bone tools, work your way through copper and bronze to iron and steel. Your settlement takes in migrants, has children, learns to farm and keep livestock, discovers new building types and improvements on current ones. You will need to defend yourself against the occasional raid, but it's not a massive part of the game and a couple of scenarios doesn't even happen. Micromanagement is not necessary in all cases, as many of the automatic functions work well, such as fishing, wood gathering and food gathering. The hunting is being tweaked to work better, and has already improved over the first release of the game. Yes there are issues. There will always be issues with a computer representation of real life, it happens. But none are game breaking and all can be workd around using some micromanagement of people, especially in the early stages where you have fewer than 20 people. All in all a very good game. Enjoyable, relaxing and fun.