The jungle feels alive with all the various animal and nature sounds and you can identify incoming threats sometimes from the sound effects alone. The game does truly shine with its sound design. The lead developer at Panache Digital, Patrice Desilets, was the creator of Assassin's Creed that influence is all over Ancestors, as it can often look like something out of one of Ubisoft's many collect-a-thons. It kind of ruins the immersion of being a hominid when you’re basically just looking at various triangles and squares. The game wants you use your intelligence and senses a lot, which often turns this lovely jungle world into a mess of question marks and various icons scattered around. Many times I found myself being prompted to intimidate nearby predators, despite not being able to find what was trying to kill me. That being said, in some areas the plant life is so thick and lush that it can be hard to find the various snakes or other beasts that are hunting you down. ![]() Learning how to make a sharp stick is a pretty big step forward. Early on, the skills you earn don’t seem all that great but then again, you’re literally playing a ape-man. Communication skills are gaining by interacting with others, new tools can be found by fooling around with rocks, and so on. As these monkeys sleep, the synapses in their brains fire off until they learn how to hold things in their other hand, or gain the ability to hear further away. They also learn just by doing things, kind of like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In this game, evolving is just a fancy way of describing the skill tree. You then scan your surroundings and go to the various markers around in order to discover new plants, items, locations, or even wildlife. You should probably get used to using this, as a lot of the game depends on having a decent level of perception of the world around you. Gaining knowledge is pretty much the main drive of Ancestors. To do this, there's a kind of monkey radar, where you can use your limited intelligence as well as your senses of smell and hearing to detect things around the area. The game is apparently the first of a trilogy, so hopefully it’ll grow into something truly incredible, but whats there now seems a very solid base to build on.Travelling around the jungle is fun as the movement feels great: climbing and jumping around is probably the best part of the game. ![]() In the end I was hoping there would be more. They have no clue what they’re doing either, they just figure it out faster than the OP here and get on with evolving into the endgame. If you want a good idea on how it plays, watch a couple of those vids. TagBackTV was the guy I mostly watched, mostly because his commentary is pretty solid and entertaining. Not enough to buy it, these games arent really for me, but watching them advance through to the end was an interesting watch. ![]() I stumbled across a couple of guys streaming it at launch, and it really sucked me in. Its an interesting take on the ol’ skill tree, and forces/encourages you to explore and not just build a fortress like most survival games. Doing that sort of stuff gets you the experience needed to unlock abilities and grow your clan. Find an area, investigate stuff, confront your fear, repeat. Once you figure out the gameplay loop, it seems pretty straightforward. While I really want Ancestors to hold my hand a little, especially to begin with, it does make for a more rewarding experience when you finally start to get it. The reviews have been harsh on this front, the game gives you very little information. I suspect I’ll eventually become better acquainted with the controls and dying will be less frequent and devastating. It also means I’m less likely to adventure out because each trip could (and often does) mean death. It makes me feel like a dick for not trying harder. And the game makes you confront your mistakes by leaving the apes’ bodies lay where they died. Unlike dying in Assassin’s Creed or Fallout, for example, there’s no going back. There are rogue apes out there in the map, it’s possible I can recruit them to save my clan’s existence but I still have no idea how to. See the thing that stands out to me isn’t the tough gameplay, it’s the time you invest into a single playthrough and how each clan death can’t be quickly undone with a strategic load. ![]() In one fell swoop, I killed humanity, or at least most of a single clan. Three apes dead in the space of two days.
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