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. Hunting down these animals gets easier as you progress and research better hunting tools, which brings us to the technology system.ĭawn of Man rewards players with knowledge points when they achieve milestones, such as collecting a certain amount of resources, the first time killing an animal, surviving through winter or a natural disaster, trading, and other miscellaneous activities. The game succeeds in diversifying the animal kingdom around you depending on the age you are currently in, including mammoths, woolly rhinos, ancient bison, megaloceros, cave lions, tigers, and many more. It is most efficient in evaluating how dangerous the animals around your settlement are, and estimating how many of your people you need to send out to hunt it down. It freezes gameplay and offers players an informative colourized vision of the world around them. ‘Primal vision’ is another innovative feature.
This makes your life so much easier, and you can even control the maximum amount of resources you want so whoever assigned to that area will stop working once they reach it. You assign a number of people to a certain area you mark on the map to gather a certain type of resources, hunt down animals, fish, or harvest and collect wild plants. But the feature I particularly enjoyed was the work areas assignment.
There is the basic build function, where 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. It doesn’t 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 does a wonderful job of introducing you to its mechanics through its simplified tutorial and easy-to-navigate UI. There’s a real feeling of satisfaction when you successfully manage to carry your population through the difficult times or hunt one of those massive mammoths roaming the land. With this in mind, Madruga Works’ Dawn of Man is a well-executed survival management title from the studio that brought us Planetbase.ĭawn of Man takes players on a long journey from the ancient Stone Age all the way through the Iron Age, spanning over ten thousand years of civilization. Survival city-builders have to get the right combination of keeping the player invested in monitoring their resources and micromanaging their citizens, while at the same time putting them in the role of making decisions on which technology to research next and guide them through difficult times as a true leader.