Dawn of Man is one of the most popular games of all time. If you have not played Dawn of Man yet, or thinking of taking up a game to play, here is a Dawn of Man Game review for you. This will hopefully help you make your decision whether to take up this game or not.
Dawn Of Man
Dawn Of Man, published and developed by Madruga Works, is a real-time strategy game with city-building and survival elements. Dawn of Man takes its players on a long journey from the ancient Stone Age all the way through the Iron Age, spanning over 10 thousand years of civilization.
At first glance, yes, Dawn of Man shares a lot of similarities to Dawn of Man is a relaxing and enjoyable stone age simulation which covers an era not often touched upon by these type of games. It has a nice relaxed pace and a few different modes.
But Dawn of Man creates its own unique identity and expands on the survival and management elements seen in the above examples.
The concept of the Dawn of Man game is nothing new. Dawn of Man is a competent city-building game set; as the name explains, during the dawn of mankind You’re embarking on a 10,000-year journey to guild your settlement from a simple time in the Stone Age, through to the Iron Age.
You’ll hunt, gather, build structures, advance technology and at times, fight to Dawn of Man is a relaxing and enjoyable stone age simulation that covers an era not often touched upon by these types of games. It has a nice relaxed pace and a few different modes.
I put a big emphasis on surviving as there will be many times you’ll barely survive- learning a valuable lesson. This is what makes Dawn of Man a great game to play.
Each Age will provide a new set of challenges, each season forces you to adjust your strategy and evolve each time.
Then when just when you think you finally understand the game, your own incompetence will get the better of you and you’ll be pressing the ESC key, selecting Quit, and starting a New Game.
Dawn of Man Premise
The game’s premise is pretty straight forward. You start with a few villagers and you need to build them a home and help them to survive.
This is a resource management game and brings up memories of Banished and even Age of Empires. New technologies are discovered. New resources are exploited. But what is ultimately important is survival.
You are welcomed with delightful prehistoric sticks and stones Village, your small tribe awaits your guidance to help to survive and flourish. With your aid, the rudimental villagers will thrive to evolve through the ages. As with all RTS and survival games, the path to glory will be a rocky one thwart with danger.
You must push your people to the limit of their abilities, fans of the genre will know that both the biggest rewards and risks occur only when you truly stretch yourself to the limits.
Typically, a level starts you off with a few people, a couple of tents, and a campfire. Your settlement starts off small, like around 10 humans to be precise.
Your village will be relatively small in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras. Largely, the gameplay focuses on day-to-day survival through foraging and hunting.
Everything changes in the Neolithic Era, as you can finally plant crops and domesticate animals. The amount of food production at this point spikes considerably and makes it easier to support larger populations.
Your villagers have some very basic tools to get started. Other than that, you’re on your own to build and shape your little pocket of civilization as you please. Typically, one starts by designating work areas for flint, sticks, fishing, hunting, and gathering wild plants.
Areas automatically assign villagers to collect these items until you hit the limit that you set. The items pile up, and villagers can use them to craft more complex tools, materials, and foodstuffs. A practiced player can turn their village into a well-oiled machine where absolutely everything is automated and direct player intervention is minimal.
When you do feel the need to intervene, the villagers are controllable with standard real-time strategy controls. This doesn’t always work out well.
There’s enough control that you can nudge them in the right direction, but the capability for finer manipulation of your villager’s tasks is somewhat lacking.
As an example, you can’t really queue up multiple actions with the Shift key like you can in some RTS games. Like the rest of humanity, your humans need food and resources to survive the big new world and to contribute towards developing your in-game settlement.
Progressing through civilization requires you to research new technology, you do this by gaining Dawn of Man is a relaxing and enjoyable stone age simulation that covers an era not often touched upon by these types of games. It has a nice relaxed pace and a few different modes.
Knowledge points
As Dawn of Man progresses, you’ll begin to hit certain gameplay milestones that grant Knowledge Points. Earning enough points is your ticket forward in time into the next era. Build your first Storage Tent? There’s a point. Build five Storage Tents? There’s another.
Most of your points will be earned by producing goods and erecting buildings. You’ll also get periodic rewards for hitting certain population numbers, hunting animals, and killing raiders.
There are also pockets of combat here and there. Mainly, players need to deal with hostile wild animals, hunt large game, and fight raiders.
Hostile wild animals like wolves and bears randomly attack but they’re otherwise a minor threat. Any group of three villagers should be able to win the day with no casualties.
The larger group battles require a degree of coordination. Hunting a wooly mammoth or rhinoceros necessitates moving a hunting party into range manually and bringing the creature down. It’s risky, but it gives you a great deal of meat, skins, and bones to sustain your people.
Knowledge points are similar to XP and are earned by nearly every activity you do such as hunting animals, crafting items, and catching fish. So, it makes sense to increase the no. of humans in your settlement to earn Knowledge points at a faster rate, right?
Well, this is correct, but it’s not as easy as queuing up 100 humans on a production queue like a traditional RTS. You can only increase your human population via 2 methods- build tents in hope that random humans find and join your settlement over time, or the old fashion way- sexual intercourse.
As you progress through the game, you will find that the XP you are earning contributes towards unlocking milestones. Milestones are essentially major achievements and are required to unlock additional game modes.
There is a real feeling of satisfaction when you successfully manage to carry your population through difficult times or hunt one of those massive mammoths roaming the land. Dawn of Man game does a wonderful job of introducing you to its mechanics through its simplified tutorial and easy-to-navigate User Interface.
It does not overwhelm you with actions and instead focuses on making your experience about managing your population and making sure they survive whatever comes in their way.
Dawn of Man Game Modes
There are three game modes available in Dawn of Man-Free play, Challenges, or Community scenarios. You must earn “Milestones” by completing certain objectives to unlock successive scenarios.
The first two start off as bog-standard games at the very beginning of the tech tree, but the third and final scenario advances players up to the Neolithic Era.
Free play mode is self-expansionary and is the main mode of the game. As you unlock milestones, you will unlock additional free play scenarios that increase with difficulty. Continental Dawn is an introductory scenario that allows players to learn the game mechanics in a less comfortable environment.
The Northlands provide an increased challenge, thanks mainly to the long winters and shorter summers that also feature limited resources. Finally, Ancient Warriors is the most difficult scenario and will challenge even the most seasoned campaigner, mostly with the constant and consistent threat of raiders.
Aside from the core campaign in Dawn of Man, there are also challenges and a Creative Mode. The challenges will occasionally take you outside of normal gameplay. For example, one of these scenarios has players walking a herd of wooly mammoths across an entire map.
The Creative Mode is intriguing, but it doesn’t allow players to select their map. That’s a bit of a downer overall as it really hampers your ability to pick the perfect location for your needs.
Functions and Features
There is a basic build function. Here the players can choose whether to build more residence buildings for a chance of higher population or production-oriented facilities to further the industrial sense of the population. You assign a certain number of people to a certain area you mark on the map.
You do this to gather a certain type of resources, hunt down animals, fish, or harvest and collect wild plants. This makes your life so much easier, and you can even control the maximum amount of resources you want so whoever is assigned to that area will stop working once they reach it.
‘Primal vision’ is another innovative feature. It freezes gameplay and offers players an informative colorized vision of the game. It is most efficient in evaluating how dangerous the animals are around your settlement. It also helps in estimating how many of your people you need to send out to hunt it down.
The game diversifies the animal kingdom around you, depending on the Age you are currently in. These include mammoths, woolly rhinos, ancient bison, megaceros, cave lions, tigers, and many more.
Hunting down these animals gets easier as you progress. You can research better hunting tools, which brings us to the technology system.
Rewards
Dawn of Man rewards its players with knowledge points when they achieve some milestones, such as collecting a certain amount of resources, the first time killing an animal, surviving a natural disaster, trading, and other miscellaneous activities.
It’s designed for the accumulation of knowledge points to come naturally through playing the game, so you don’t have to go out of your way to earn them.
Knowledge points are spent on researching new technologies to craft new hunting tools, build better facilities, domesticate animals, and fortify your settlement. They can be spent freely; however, you are constrained with the Age you are in at the time.
You are free to unlock technologies in whatever order you choose, and this is where you need to make choices, since certain technologies will help you more than others, especially early on.
Gameplay Experience
What makes DOM stand out for me is the varied ways in which your people can lose their life. A focus on the survival element of the game rather than just the vast and beautiful empire that you create gives the game a refreshing edge to a rather busy genre.
You are always one move away from disaster, but luckily that doesn’t have to mean the end. Like with all games every positive has to have a negative, one which has been mentioned is the clunky UI. The other is a blessing and also a curse.
The slow-paced nature at the beginning will allow you to get used to the Dawn of Man gameplay in a comfortable manner, but this pace is always there even when you start a new map. What was once a convenience now turns into a slow and infuriating time sink which makes the early stages feel arduous, even boring.
While Dawn of Man is fun to play, I can see how it may get old quickly, especially if you like a challenge. The challenges themselves offer something slightly different, but personally, I just found them to be frustrating.
There are also only four of them, so if you are good at these kinds of things, the challenge won’t last long. Playing in different sections of the map doesn’t vary the Dawn of Man gameplay too much, especially past the initial stages, and the Creative mode removes any obstacles completely.
The hidden gem to combatting this may lie in the community tab, a section that allows you to download and play scenarios created by the steam community. Steam offers a guide that tells players how to create their own scenarios, including goals for players to meet. I’ve yet to explore these, but I am looking forward to trying them.
For those who become fanatics of Dawn of Man, then there is even the option to play across a hardcore single-player mode, where everything is trying to kill you even more than before, limiting your saves and the like.
Nicely there are challenge modes in place as well, putting you into the world with several different scenarios in place, left to hit targets and objectives. It’s a neat addition that gives the game plenty more hours of fun to the already pretty lengthy process.
Conclusion
Overall, Dawn of Man is a relaxing and enjoyable stone age simulation that covers an era not often touched upon by these type of games. It has a nice relaxed pace and a few different modes. A great game that is a great mix of a city-builder with elements of a traditional RTS.
Much in the vein of Banished, another excellent example of a city building or simulation, but Dawn of War just simply does it better. Sure Dawn of Man on Xbox One is a strong entry into the RTS console market. It has the necessary tools to keep you invested and coming back for more.
If you want to spend time building and developing your own civilization through the ages, do not hesitate to give the Dawn of Man game a try.
The more time you put into Dawn of Man, the more experience you gain, and additional settlers will arrive, especially as you go about creating bigger buildings and making use of the variety of tools on offer like food dryers and storage units.
And as you progress, you’ll discover the movement from the Stone to Iron Age, with a ton more goodies on offer. Like all great games of this type, there are hours and hours of gameplay to be found within, not to mention the extra challenges on offer and the specific hardcore option for the hardcore fans. Overall, the game is fun to play and a relaxing way to while away the hours.
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