Dak'kon
Yabba 2tha dabba-doo, biznatches!
Vaaaroooook!
Moron.
So yeah, Varok is now very, very KO-ed. As are the two other morons who ran up to the same mammoth one by one.
Rest in peace.
(Morons.)
Dawn of Man: the game for people who thought Banished needed more cave bears.
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| Welcome to Nyctimus ca. half-past Lascaux |
A rising trend in the recent crop of city simulators has been to take the Settlers route, go smaller, survival-themed and more people-centered ("village" simulators mixed with base-building) instead of focusing on sprawling megalopolitan zones as per the more classic SimCity feel. This approach can lend a greater air of immediacy and relevance to on-screen events but it also risks running into both the creepiness and frustration of the Sims games, leaning into the psyches of a handful of unfortunate playthings, micromanaging their daily lives like you're the Allied Mastercomputer while constantly wanting to wring their algorithms for not performing logically.
So. Much. Haaaaaaate.
In truth, this is not a complicated game. Your cave-men, cave-women and cave-urchins inhabit a map full of basic resources like flint, sticks and various tasty furry things to be poked with said flint and sticks. Guide your hapless mooks through keeping themselves warm, fed, sheltered and external to the stomachs of cave lions. As you gradually accumulate communal life experience you'll advance through the various stone and metal ages and replace your shallow two-tier tech tree with slightly improved, still shallow three-tier tech trees. Technically, your neolithic neophytes are supposed to have the wherewithal to pick their own tasks of among your decrees, allowing you to automate the tedium of daily life.
Technically... doesn't that word just make you cringe?
Technically, villagers are supposed to organize themselves into hunting parties for larger, more dangerous game.
In practice, unless you manually move them next to each other before launching the attack they'll merrily get themselves mastodo-mashed, rhino-plastered or bison-buggered one by one.
Technically, they're supposed to manage their own food/water needs.
In practice, maps are larger than their pathfinding can sort, and any villagers sent on a long expedition have decent odds of dying just a few steps away from water or food.
Technically, they have a stamina bar for sprinting.
In practice, they only use that stamina bar when trying to catch up to a combat target. They'll never sprint to get something they truly need (even if they're freezing, starving or dehydrated) and they never run from a fight when low on health.
Technically, they and their transports have multiple inventory slots.
In practice, they'll drag a six-slot sledge halfway across the map to pick up a single item than even a child could've fit in its pocketses, ignoring other necessary resources along the way.
Technically, they're supposed to work in groups of four to drag megaliths to construction sites.
In practice, they again get confused by long distances. The first worker starts dragging (and will likely starve to death for his trouble) while one or two others will stand about aimlessly back at the village. Also, if you have multiple construction sites they'll occasionally drag a megalith back and forth as new workers take the lead and try to move it to their own randomly selected destination.
Long story short, the AI is about as capable as the workers in a late-'90s RTS. While it is possible to give direct orders, many tasks will not allow it and the sheer volume of the remainder makes it impractical except for the odd mammoth-hunt. You'll be relying on a surplus of labor to pick up the slack. And this is hardly the only bit of missing functionality. As long hauls and long hunts are cross-map adventures, it's easy to lose track of shifting targets. One would assume RTS-style group designations (e.g. "ctrl+#) would be a basic feature. Build menu hotkeys are just as conspicuously absent. On the outright bizarre end of things, the options menu is inaccessible from in-game... even volume settings!
Corners were cut.
Buildings of each particular era all use exactly the same model. The ambient fauna is somewhat under-represented, except for a surprising breadth of (easily-reskinned) horny ungulates. Even character names lack variety so as to pepper your standard population of 50-100 with several Varoks at once.
Most of us are nevertheless willing to excuse these undeniable lacks because Dawn of Man is simply so... charming. It captures the same dreamy, cozy, immersive frontier aesthetic as Banished, with the added bonus of a more focused, better-defined setting. Moreover, though so far it seems a very simplistic, easy, idiot-friendly game, its nominal survival theme carries through in every aspect. In terms of resources, what you see is very much what you get, each unit of meat or wood having a presence on the game map and in your storehouses, so that it's easy to get caught up in watching stone by stone being stacked. Transparency is a beautiful thing.
You can't help but feel a little bit proud of your plucky little wattle-and-daub wonderland with every new message of "you've survived the winter" and though megalithic structures are certainly important, they're not the point of the game. Instead you advance mainly by standing the test of time. Another harvest, another couple of huts, another winter's worth of straw laid by the mangers. This is a game you leave running in the background for hours and days on end just so you can alt-tab every few minutes and soak in the sight of your villagers braving the vicissitudes of the bronze age. The minimalist music, the gently waving vegetation and ambient whooshing of the weather, the animals lazing about, the grisly skull totems with their ribbons billowing in the wind, the individual units of flour and flint waiting to be collected, it's all surprisingly tangible, and this visceral quality has made Dawn of Man more successful than anyone would've predicted.
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