An Early Access code was used with many thanks to Camlann Games.
The Ancients is a little bit of a strange game. Going into it, I thought it would look and feel a lot like Valheim or some of the other survival-type games I have played, but it is instead something completely different.
Playing The Ancients
The Ancients is a survival game, sort of, but it’s also kind of a board game too. But let’s start at the beginning. Opening up The Ancients to play gives us a view into a pre-historic time. We see a group of hunter-gatherers around a campfire. You have the option to jump right into gameplay or to try the demo. I, being a practised gamer with a lot of survival games under my belt, decided to jump right into the game.
That was a huge mistake.
The Ancients is wildly confusing to try without learning more about it; the developers should have just forced you to play the tutorial and then made it skippable for returning players. Instead of being able to free-roam, you are limited to the number of actions per turn. You have to complete your two actions; then, you need to pass the turn to the environment. You walk between tiles, and you can pick the resources from that tile; they are hexagonal and similar in look to Catan boards.
Even when playing the tutorial, The Ancients is not very intuitive to me. I stumbled through the first couple of rounds, realized how similar this was to Civilization, and immediately felt overwhelmed. You have so much to look after, so many things can go wrong. Turns out, your tribe can murder people or get murdered, can go hungry, can be attacked by wild animals, and can get killed by weather events and other horrible things.
A Very Stressful Experience
For me, The Ancients is pretty stressful to play. If you are looking for a fun, relaxing time, this might not be the one for you. It reminds me a lot of playing other Civ-type games. You start with a tribe, and you need to feed all those people, upgrade your sciences and resource gathering, have kids, manage your turns, and there is SO MUCH TO DO.
It’s why I usually avoid Civilization-type games; my brain is being pulled in too many directions. The tech tree has so much information on it that my brain immediately scrambled. I know for a fact that The Ancients is not a game for me. So I decided instead to try Sandbox mode, hoping to get more comfortable with the controls and the turns before I dove into the deep end again.
It turns out that even Sandbox mode is incredibly confusing. The tutorial isn’t much help either in presenting all the things that can happen to your people, where you should go, and how you should go about building yourself a camp.
Final Thoughts
The Ancients has great music, but the graphics feel a little PlayStation 2. It’s complex, but it doesn’t do a great job of introducing you to its complexity. I have a feeling that most players who pick up The Ancients will already have a foundation in Civ-type games and will probably have a lot more luck with it than I did. I spent my time overwhelmed and confused, and I don’t recommend this to beginners of the genre.
The Ancients is released on Early Access, and you can find the Steam page here.
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