The game's pacing is glacial and the interface for exploring and navigating is tedious and frustrating to use, as if the city doesn't want to move. The city-building itself is okay, but as mentioned in the tutorial, staying on the move to acquire more resources is core to the game. Unfortunately, that core part is not well-implemented.
Dawn of Man offers a nice insight into the part of human history where food and survival were everything, and accordingly, has an excellent sense of progression. For the most part, the game moves at a slow, relaxing pace... with the occasional moment of terror from extreme weather, 'raiders', or animal attacks! Navigating the game map can be difficult, and some aspects of the game seem unfinished. The 'raider' AI, for example, is usually good about approaching defenses, but shows a strange fixation on destroying buildings. For example (at least when playing 'Ancient Warriors') the 'raiders' will bash down your gate, even if the wall around it hasn't been built yet. If they defeat your defenders, they move on destroy everything you've ever built, then wait for you to build more so they can kick it down. They don't seem interested in capturing your children or in claiming resources, which seems to make the term 'raiders' a misnomer, and removes the the sense you're up against human enemies with their own needs and goals. Most of the game is about managing resources and your population's workload, the city-building portion takes more of a backseat... except when things get violent, at which time your layout becomes a matter of life or death! After a few days of play, I still have a lot to learn about how to build defensively (which is why I can tell you the raider AI seems to lack an endgame). If you're better at this aspect of design than I am, you might only see the raiders try in vain to get past your walls. The environment and creature models are beautiful, though the lighting and terrain textures can seem sterile, like some other games feel when they haven't quite finished loading. There's a lot of diversity in the character models, though this can seem strange when each individual has random skin and hair colours. Overall, I like this game, and even after three partial playthroughs and more than fifteen hours, I'm looking forward to playing more of it.
