TFM: The First Men Review Summary

Engaging and Rewarding Gameplay: Players find the game highly enjoyable and immersive, especially once its unique and complex mechanics are understood. It offers significant replayability through procedural generation and diverse progression paths, making it a compelling experience for fans of deep strategy and base-building.

Unique Genre Blend: The game stands out for its innovative combination of RTS, 4X, RPG, and colony simulation elements. This unique mixture, particularly the character-focused colony management, offers a fresh and deep experience within the genre.

Active and Responsive Development: The developers are highly praised for their frequent updates, active community engagement, and responsiveness to player feedback. This consistent evolution and a promising roadmap instill confidence in the game's future potential.

Distinctive Art Style and Atmosphere: The game's unique comic book-style graphics, combined with atmospheric music, create an immersive and visually appealing experience. Players appreciate the blend of fantasy and historical visuals, enhancing the mythological setting.

Deep Character Progression: A core strength is the character-driven progression system, where attributes, skills, and traits shape individual destinies and influence tribe development. Players enjoy cultivating stronger characters and exploring diverse career paths.

Steep Learning Curve & Poor Onboarding: Players find the game's initial experience overwhelming due to unintuitive mechanics, a confusing UI, and a significant lack of proper guidance. The current tutorial is insufficient, buggy, and fails to adequately prepare new players for core gameplay loops, leading to frustration and a feeling of being lost.

Incomplete & Buggy State: The game is perceived as unfinished, with numerous bugs, clunky mechanics, and a general lack of polish. Many players feel it was released prematurely, lacking essential quality-of-life features and a clear direction for its final form.

Overpriced for Current State: Many players feel the game's price is too high given its current unfinished state, numerous bugs, and limited content. They believe it does not offer sufficient value for money, especially for an Early Access title.

Excessive Micromanagement & Tedium: The game demands an unreasonable amount of manual input and micromanagement, especially as colonies grow. Tasks like replacing workers, managing individual colonist traits, and handling equipment are repetitive and detract from enjoyment, making the game feel like an 'idle clicker' rather than a strategic management title.

Performance & Optimization Issues: Players report significant lag and frame drops, particularly in the late game when colonies expand. This poor optimization negatively impacts the gameplay experience, making it frustrating to manage larger settlements.

Complex Villager Management: Players must individually manage villagers' five color-coded life-sustaining statuses, assign traits for jobs, and monitor needs like relaxation. Villagers are mostly autonomous but require player intervention to prevent death from depleted energy levels or old age. Villagers can also get stuck, requiring a save/load or rebuilding structures.

Strategic Colony Simulation: The game is a strategic colony simulation combining character-driven base building, exploration, and real-time tactical combat. Players collect resources, craft equipment, and plan buildings, character skills, and tasks. It focuses more on map exploration and boss fights than base defense.

Deep Character Progression: Characters gain experience through work, which can be spent on new skills, stat upgrades, or choosing 'Personalities' (passive buffs) or 'Passions' (gathering/crafting abilities). This RPG-like growth allows players to flesh out characters and keep them alive for extended periods.

Profession and Building Unlocks: To unlock new buildings and crafting items, villagers must first select specific professions. Once a profession is chosen, a corresponding profession-specific building can be constructed, which is essential for the villager to perform their work.

Party-Based Exploration: Players can form small parties of 4 adventurers to scout the map, engage enemies, and collect loot. This involves drafting colonists from their normal duties to follow player commands and move to specific locations.

Performance issues with large populations: Players report significant frame drops and lag when their settlements grow to 20-50 people or more, indicating the game struggles with late-game population scaling. This is a common concern for an Early Access title.

Moderate system requirements: The game is generally considered to have medium PC requirements, with some players noting its graphical style is less demanding, similar to 'Don't Starve'. One reviewer provided their system specs (8086k, 1080ti, 32GB RAM) which suggests a mid-to-high-end setup.

Mixed bug reports: While some players experienced no bugs, others mentioned general bug reports as part of the Early Access experience. This suggests an inconsistent bug presence across the player base.

Wait for future improvements: Many players advise against purchasing the game in its current state, recommending to wait for further development, bug fixes, and content updates. This sentiment is often tied to the game's Early Access status and perceived lack of polish or features.

Target audience for strategy fans: The game is highly recommended for players who enjoy deep strategy, colony-sim, or God-sim genres, especially those who appreciate games like Majesty, Rimworld, or Oxygen Not Included. It appeals to those seeking a challenge and new systems to learn.

Improve tutorial and UI: Players frequently request a more comprehensive tutorial to ease the learning curve for new players. Additionally, UI improvements are desired to reduce micromanagement frustrations and enhance overall usability.

Enhance task and priority management: Suggestions include allowing players to set priorities for character tasks and crafting based on storage thresholds. There's also a desire to simplify some professions into basic, universally available tasks, particularly for construction.

Add diverse content and features: Players are looking for more diverse events, scenarios, and additional content to enhance replayability. Specific suggestions include improving Tradition UI/choices, adding a 'focus' button for item sending, and an auto-management feature for character points.

Long-Term Player Engagement: Many players have been following the game's development for a long time, are committed to its journey, and plan to continue playing and checking for updates. They are invested in its future.

Early Access with Potential: Players acknowledge the game is in Early Access and still rough around the edges, but see significant potential for future development. They understand it's a work in progress by a small team.

Gameplay Direction Concerns: Some veteran players express frustration with recent changes, feeling that original features were removed, making the game simpler. They prefer the previous, more complex direction.

Desire for More Content/Difficulty: Players want more challenging gameplay, including more enemies, random encounters, bigger maps, and a larger campaign. They also suggest advanced difficulty settings for equipment design.

Suggested Gameplay Mechanics: Players propose new features like a soft population limit, infinitely expanding maps, a dungeon system with roguelike elements, and resurrection mechanics.