Dawn of Man

Steep learning curve; first play through can be difficult.
When you have a good grasp of this games mechanics it is a LOT of fun.
I highly recommend this game and rate it 9.5 of 10.

I absolutely love this game; it's one of the best city builders in my library. The soundtrack is gorgeous, the game play is immersive and feels naturally progressive, and I love that the developers have obviously put effort into making it as historically accurate as possible.
I do have one constructive criticism - I'm now 130 hours in, have played through many, many times, and I think I've basically exhausted the game's current potential. It appears that the developer is no longer working on this game (which I'm okay with - games can't be worked on indefinitely!), but there's also no real capacity for modders to continue where the developer left off. Games like Cities: Skylines, Banished, and Timberborn are all fantastic examples of how the modding community can expand upon a great city builder game (adding new assets, modes, levels, research lines, etc.) and extend a game's lifespan.
I suggest, as a final update, add good modding support so the fans can continue on this game's legacy. Maybe in 5 years' time, I could be watching my villagers updating roundhouses to Roman villas, raising chickens, or having trackable family trees.

I don't play a lot of games for long stretches of time. And when I do play a game for long periods, after I've done the majority of things to do, I usually don't come back to that game unless there is new content added or the game is in early access with a major update, or something like that. Dawn of Man is one of the few games that breaks this trend for me. I played it for a bunch of hours/days/weeks after its release, and fell in love with the game, its mechanics, and learning all the things it had to offer. Then I would switch to something else for a while, but as I scrolled through my library for something new to play, I would often find myself hesitating with my mouse hovering over Dawn of Man... and inevitably, I would play it again. And 250+ hours and several years later, I still enjoy this game! I am actually thinking about starting another playthrough and see how many hardcore milestones and achievements I can unlock (I still haven't unlocked everything...).
I consider myself a "regular, average, every-day gamer"; I don't aspire to be a content creator or reviewer; and I definitely don't have tons of extra time on my hands to become an expert gamer whether by skill mastery or content knowledge (by any definition or stretch of the imagination). Because of my time limitations, I often gravitate towards games that I can pick up easily (low-skill-level entry), that are not too challenging (if I only have an hour or so to play, I don't want to feel like a miserable failure with no hope of success within 30 minutes), and I can save progress and easily get back in the mindset of where I was when I come back to the game after a few days (or perhaps even a week or two) away. Dawn of Man checks all those boxes and a whole lot more for me. There is just enough management to keep me engaged, but not so much micro that I am overwhelmed or have a hard time keeping track between sessions. The theme is well-suited to the gameplay and the two actually intertwine quite nicely in my opinion. I "feel" like I'm leading a pre-historic tribe/village, with the perfect balance between immersion and abstraction. The difficulty levels seem appropriate given the target/intended gamer skill-level at each, with hardcore really being about no save-cheating instead of making the game engine/AI impossible.
The developers continue to support the finished product, which really says a lot about the game itself as well as the dev team as a whole. Madruga Works takes pride in their accomplishment and wants to ensure that it continues to run smoothly and without vulns. And while many gamers often complain when developers stop creating new content for their completed work, in my opinion, for the devs that care about their art, it means they've finished what they set out to do. Admittedly, sometimes that is negative, meaning a game was "abandoned", or had a lot of potential, but the ideas or ambition just got away from the team and they had to move on. But this is NOT the case with Dawn of Man. It IS a complete game. It FEELS like a complete game. And yes, Madruga Works has moved on to their next project. But that doesn't mean they abandoned this game or what they set out to do with it. I am very much looking forward to their next endeavor, Planetbase2, which they have already stated several times, will build on the lessons learned from this game, Dawn of Man, and expand in a natural, logical progression. With the care and attention given to Dawn of Man, I have no doubts.
Now, of course, this game isn't for everyone. Not all gamers enjoy city-builder/colony-sim style games. Not all gamers like survival type games. Not all gamers like games that don't seem to have end-goals or objectives that progress a player to a "victory" (meaning, the player is left to create their own sense of "victory" within the game). So, if you are not interest in any of those types of games, then you won't be satisfied with or be engaged by Dawn of Man. But if you are at all interested in any of these, whether separately or combined, even just a little bit, then I absolutely, without reservation, recommend you try this game. It's worth your time to try, and it is worth the money, if anything to support a dev team that cares about their art and seeks to achieve excellence in their craft.

If you do not like overly difficult games, this one might not be for you. As a gamer, this game has the worst game play curve and difficulty scales I've ever seen. As an archaeologist, this game is pure black tar heroin. 10/10 would recommend.

One of the Most Addicting Colony Survival Sims I've Played
There is a lot that keeps bringing me back to Dawn of Man, even after I felt like I got my fill out of it. For starts, it's charming and grounded. The mechanics make sense, the UI is clean and simple, the presentation is beautiful, and every action, even sequence of actions, feels important. Give your people too much to do, and they'll get overwhelmed; don't give them enough to do, and they may soon face some crucial shortfall in resources or infrastructure as famine, blizzards, or raiders descend upon their tribe -- sometimes, all at once. Crucially, all of your tribesmen have needs, which, if not met, will decrease their efficiency, make them ill, or outright kill them. Hardcore mode takes things even further by eliminating real-time pause and allowing other tribes to develop at their own pace, making technological development and defense far more urgent matters.
But really, what keeps bringing me back to Dawn of Man are the stories that can form from each play. These are not stories written into the game, and there is no dialogue, but they are of the tribesmen, their actions, and how you, as their god, respond.
I once watched a Paleolithic tribeswoman named Marah return from a wooly mammoth hunt, spoils of her kill in tow, followed by the band of hunters she went out with. Marah had delivered the killing blow on the mammoth, and its meat would sustain the tribe through the winter. Unfortunately, Marah was gored by a tusk during the hunt, and contracted an infection right before a blizzard hit. Marah ate some mammoth meat and went to a tent to ride out the storm -- food and rest, the recipe for any illness. Sadly, once the blizzard passed and Marah woke up, her condition had worsened. As her last action, Marah went to the skull pole outside the communal storage hut and prayed. In the middle of her prayer, she died. She was the first of the tribe to go. I didn't have burial rituals, so Marah laid where she fell. From then on, I decided for myself that it would be a holy site for the tribe, deified Marah as Goddess of the Hunt, and named the site "The Temple of Marah." As time went on, the site developed.
Ultimately, this is a resource management sim that never loses its focus. It succeeds at making you feel like you're in the shoes of your ancestors at the dawn of civilization. My only complaint is that the end game feels...eh. You find yourself with a big settlement and not much else to do besides keep expanding and defending against raiders until the map's resources run out. Could just be that I'm playing too much.
Anyway, yeah, highly recommend for anyone who's a fan of the colony sim genre, or of anthropological prehistory.

Major issues, but it's fun enough it's worth a play if you buy it on sale. The AI is painfully and unforgivably stupid, it makes what should be simple tasks stressful, and lets be real, this is a task oriented game. Villagers die from the absolute dumbest and preventable reasons, they won't pack a lunch before leaving, they won't forage on the way home on long trips while starving, they walk into predators, they won't change into warm clothes while working because either they won't programmed to do it or their task priorities are deadly rigid - once they start a job it's do or die. It's pretty inexcusable because this is a basic problem that settlement survival sims have been handling and solving for decades.

There are far too few paleolithic/neolithic games in this world, and this one is particularly fun and cohesive even if a little small-scale or simple at times. What you get is what you get, but it's a fun RTS in a criminally underutilized setting and it may be the most functional of the prehistoric colony games available.
Note: Most of my playtime was on Xbox where it works surprisingly well for an RTS