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Unique and Beautiful Early Access Game.
Together with Sapiens plain-air-like visuals, intimate interaction with your tribe members, and a world that not only is vast but also captures the sense of vastness, I think this game will in due time top my list of best games ever played.
Let's start with the good bits.
For a indie game and basically a one-man production, sapiens has a smoothness and feel that is very welcoming and pleasant. Performance is great, and visuals are -although not mind-blowingly detailed down to the very last sand-grain- is painted with a larger brush. The effort in visuals are on another scale, and realism comes before detail in a unique take on natural visuals. Clouds will light up in the sunrise, distant rolling hills will fade out in the staggering horizon, and mountains will cast impressive shadows which fall over your village at dusk. It's a really refreshing look compared to the often-so cluttered appearance of AAA games.
Your sapiens' are not anonymous resources for your mongering, but unique individuals with different needs and attributes. You get to know your tribe members as individuals, which will grow into little stories as you play along. Individual sapiens will grow and learn different skills, without enforcing any needless 'classes' or rigidity to the system. You will watch them go from babies to children to teenagers to adults, trough times of hardship, doubts and achievement.
Sapiens encourages your creativity and imagination by giving you a lot of freedom when building your world and deciding how you want to play the game. If you want a branch to stick out of a wall with a balancing coconut on it, you can make it. The game simply offers you a handful of versatile tools which you can use as you like. The ability to embellish your village without it having any real effect on the game mechanics or the behaviour of your sapiens' encourages a playful playing-style, at least for me.
When we think of the downsides of Sapiens, we of course need to take into consideration that the game is in early access and is developed by one single person. However, there are a few pressing issues which come between you and enjoying the game, and some less urgent issues but which when implemented could really shoot Sapiens to the moon.
First and foremost, and what I think most people will agree on, is the quite clunky and click-heavy macro-management. Multi-select has been brought up by numerous reviewers, and I'm not going to re-hash that discussion in its entirety, but my opinion is that fewer clicks are needed to select multiple items. At the moment I'm so discouraged to select multiple things that I avoid it unless it's absolutely necessary. The second most disturbing issue is how crafting is handled on scale. Don't get me wrong, the crafting works great when a few items needs to be done, but automating things on a greater scale is really tedious. At the moment, every storage that you create, and every crafting spot, can only store/craft a single type of item, and they take up a lot of space! And it's not like you need one storage for food and one for wood, no, you need one storage for stone knives and one for flint knives! You end up having to create enormous hangars of storage just so that you can store both your pine cones and you flax seed indoors. I'm sure however that the developer is aware of this issue and that a better solution is on its way.
Other issues related to village management are again, what's most discouraging for me. It's hard to know whether there's enough food or not. Wanting to build some small shelter close to your mining site sometime sends half the tribe on a massive exodus just to put some sticks together. People sometimes sit weirdly out in the middle of nowhere just because they didn't have an immediate task that called them to head back home to the village. People sit with their backs weirdly against the door when indoors, invoking images of working-camps or crowded prisons in mind. Again, these are issues that we expect form and early access game in that I'm confident will be addressed with the same skill and thoughtfulness that pervade the rest of the game.
There are other things, however, that don't fit into the category of minor fixes or quality-of-life improvements. These are probably very individual and this is just my personal take of it, of course.
The lack of exploration!
One of the first things that strike me about sapiens is the impressive size of the world. Being a life-long hiking enthusiast, looking at the distant hills and lakes invokes a feeling of wanderlust in me. This is however, not part of Sapiens gameplay at the moment, and I'm left scratching my head as to why the world has to be so massive when it's not being utilized.
I tried once to play as a "migratory" tribe. Again, thanks to the freedom the game provides, you can. I found it very fun to lead a small tribe up a hill, down the other side, and just being on the move. However, the game does not give you the tools to play the game like this, and becoming sedentary is ultimately the only choice at the moment. This to me, is the biggest issue for sapiens. If we want to play a game where we organize a stone-age village and lead them trough millennia of technological advancement, there are other games out there, and some, frankly, does it better in terms of macro-managing the village. There are however, no games out there, in that particular genre, that can compete with Sapiens size, freedom and visual appeal, and I think that these are the aspects of sapiens that once fully harnessed, can make Sapiens a trail-blazing and influential classic.