Sapiens Review (A.sh)
Right, So this will be my first Review, mainly because i really loved the concept of this game, and i was a follower of Dave (the developer of this game) since the early phases of development,
It's worth mentioning that this game was developed completely by one bright guy over almost 8 years.
However, I can't truly recommend this game in its current state, and quite frankly, i don't think this game will ever reach its potential,
TLDR: The Game is merely a great "Concept" It shows you the amazing things that can be done, a truly one of a kind world generation system, and a nice building system.
Despite all that it doesn't really shine in anything it does, every aspect of the game itself is basic at best, it suffers from balancing issues, most tasks seem like a chore, the AI is subpar, and development is extremely slow and focused on totally the wrong areas.
Now let's go deeper on the concerns i mentioned above,
- The first engagement you have with the game is breathtaking, it lets you generate your version of the Earth, allowing you to choose one of many tribes scattered around the planet in the biome you choose ranging in difficulty, it's very detailed, massive and intriguing. but that is it, once you choose your tribe, your interaction with the generated world stops, you don’t have the option of migrating your tribe for example, you can’t see the other tribes that you didn’t choose, you can’t trade with them, talk to them, or raid or anything, they just cease to exist.
- The main aspect in the game is to guide your sapien tribe onto new discoveries, establishing agriculture, defense, and dealing with the tough nature of their lives,
But the discovery system immediately start to become a hindrance to your progression in the game, many times your entire tribe will abandon you or die before you finish your discovery, forcing you to always have a very linear progression through the discoveries therefore losing the premise of the game, on top of that, the game doesn’t offer much content in regards to discoveries…
- The survival aspect of your tribe basically consists of a constant struggle with the AI, marching for days looking for a source of food despite the massively generated world, micromanaging your sapiens to avoid their stupid decisions, and eventually after 3 hours of gameplay losing it all to 16 mammoths surrounding your camp which BTW is the mammoths preferred destination all the time…
The sapiens have no clue of their surroundings, they don’t look for a closer source of manure for example by their own, they don’t take precautions when going on long trips such as food, they don’t understand that mammoths wants to ram them out of existence and have no embedded AI whatsoever, finding yourself oftentimes losing sapiens all over the map because they decided to sleep whilst starving under the rain 3 days of walking distance away from the camp, forcing you to micromanage every single decision the sapiens take.
- on top of that, the UI is terrible, there’s no way for you to search for anything, every single build item is dumped in one screen, managing storage is very primitive, and icons seem to disappear every now and then, losing track of what's going on. Also, many times you find yourself playing with maxed zoom on the screen looking for limestone rocks which get tiring very quickly without any way to highlight it.
- Lastly, why i really don’t recommend the game is due to not only the very slow updates ( 2 Main and minimal updates in 1 year ) is because the roadmap doesn’t really address the points i mentioned above at all, despite the community complaining about some of them since the game launch,
Dave however is currently focused on enabling controller support for some reason, porting the game to MAC, having multiplayer even though the game is struggling in many aspects right now, and giving you more building options…
I would really like a more in depth and concise approach to the game roadmap, like more discoveries, better UI/AI, enabling some aspects in the game that are currently useless( Water for example ), better terraforming system and so on.
Overall, currently the game is very simple and short, suffers from a lots of issues related to mechanics and AI, and there is no hope in sight.
Buy it only if you don't mind waiting 7 years or so for a real complete game.