Age of Cavemen

Age of Cavemen is a free-to-play multiplayer strategy game set in a prehistoric world where players take on the role of a village chief. The core gameplay involves building and managing a thriving settlement, defending against wild dangers and rival clans, forging alliances, and leading armies in real-time battles to conquer the world through city-building and tactical simulation.

Age of Cavemen: Review

Introduction: A Stone Agealso-ran in a Crowded Savanna

In the mid-2010s, the mobile strategy landscape was a dominated by a single, towering monolith: Clash of Clans. Its success spawned a thousand imitators, each seeking to capture a slice of the lucrative base-building, army-training, PvP-raiding market. Into this crowded field stepped Age of Cavemen, a free-to-play, cross-platform MMO strategy title from Polish indie studio Fuero Games. At first glance, it seemed poised to stand out with its distinctive prehistoric skin, complete with “trained dinosaurs” and a cartoonish, family-friendly aesthetic. But beneath the charming surface lay a familiar, and ultimately fragile, edifice. This review will argue that Age of Cavemen is a quintessential example of genre derivation—competently assembled but creatively stagnant, whose lifecycle from 2015 launch to 2022 server shutdown perfectly encapsulates the brutal economics and player fatigue that would later plague countless free-to-play “clones.”

Development History & Context: From Mobile Beginnings to Steam’s Graveyard

The Studio and Vision: Fuero Games Sp. z o.o. was an independent Polish developer with a modest portfolio. Their most notable prior work was contributing to The Witcher Battle Arena (2015) for CD Projekt RED, a mobile MOBA. This experience with mobile-focused, free-to-play design is directly evident in Age of Cavemen. The studio’s vision was clear: apply the proven, lucrative formula of social mobile strategy games to a universally accessible prehistoric theme. There is no evidence of a deep, auteur-driven creative vision; instead, the game reads as a calculated market entry, banking on a familiar theme to lower the barrier to entry for a audience weary of knights, orcs, and sci-fi soldiers.

Technological Constraints & Platform Strategy: Built in the Unity engine, the game was technically designed for multiplatform reach from the start. This was a strategic necessity, not a luxury. The mobile market (Android and iOS) was primary, with a Windows (and later Windows Phone) release following. The requirement for a “Network connection” on all platforms underscores its nature as a live-service, server-dependent game. The “Diagonal-down” perspective and “Real-time” pacing were genre standards, optimized for touchscreens but functional on PC. The Steam release in May 2016 arrived after a Steam Greenlight campaign (approved February 2016), a common path for mobile-to-PC ports seeking legitimacy and a broader audience at a time when Steam was rapidly expanding its free-to-play catalog.

The Gaming Landscape: Age of Cavemen launched in August 2015 on mobile, a period of peak saturation for its genre. Supercell’s Clash of Clans (2012) and Boom Beach (2014) were entrenched giants. Gameloft’s DomiNations (2015) offered a slightly more sophisticated historical take. The game’s premise—”conquer or be conquered” in the Stone Age—wasn’t novel (cf. Far Cry Primal’s release in 2016), but its application to the city-builder/MMO-strategy hybrid was. Its core innovation, as noted in the Gamepressure description, was the inclusion of “trained dinosaurs” as units, a fantastical twist on prehistoric warfare. However, this singular hook was insufficient to differentiate it in a market where players had already invested thousands of hours and dollars into established titles.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Law of the Strongest, The grind of the Free-to-Play

Plot and Characters: A Vague Impressionism: Age of Cavemen possesses the narrative depth of a stone tablet. The official ad copy sets the stage: “Set in a time long before modern civilization caveman operated on one basic law, conquer or be conquered.” There is no named protagonist, no overarching villain, no scripted story campaign with character development. The player is a faceless “Chieftain” or “village chief.” The “plot” is the player’s own emergent narrative of expansion, conflict, and alliance.

Themes: Survival, Social Darwinism, and Player-Driven Conflict: The game’s themes are purely mechanical and sociological. It simulates a Hobbesian prehistory where life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” but filtered through a bright, cartoony lens. The core theme is unadulterated competition and resource acquisition. The “dangers of the wild” mentioned in the store description are abstracted into periodic AI attacks and, more crucially, attacks from other players. This is not a story about taming nature; it is a story about dominating other people. The “alliances” and “Tribes” are pragmatic tools for survival in a player-vs-player (PvP) ecosystem, reflecting the cynical social realism of the genre: you cooperate to better compete.

The inclusion of “trained dinosaurs” introduces a theme of primal power fantasy. Commanding a Tyrannosaurus rex or a Triceratops in battle is the ultimate expression of the “conquer” imperative. It elevates the caveman from a simple tool-user to a beast-master, tapping into a deep-seated fantasy of dominating the ancient world’s most formidable creatures. Yet, this theme is purely cosmetic; a dinosaur unit functions like any other powerful, resource-intensive troop, its thematic resonance immediately squandered by the game’s grindy progression.

Dialogue and World-Building: There is no meaningful dialogue or environmental storytelling. The world is a blank canvas of generic prehistoric terrain (jungles, beaches, rocky outcrops) populated by the player’s village and others like it. The “world” is purely a map for conflict, not a place with history or mystery. The thematic shallowness is a direct consequence of the game’s design priority: to facilitate endless loops of building, training, and attacking, not to tell a story.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Clash Blueprint, Worn Thin

Core Loop and Progression: The gameplay is a near-carbon copy of Clash of Clans. The moment-to-moment is exhaustively detailed by the MMOHuts review: “harvest and stockpile resources (likely Food, Wood, Stone, Gold), upgrade and arrange buildings, then train units for defense and for attacks.” Resource generation buildings (e.g., huts, mines) are upgraded to increase output. Storage buildings are upgraded to hold more. Defensive structures (walls, towers, traps) are placed to create a perimeter. Barracks, stables, and “dinosaur pens” train armies. Progress is gated by a level system; your main “Town Hall” equivalent must be upgraded to unlock new buildings and units. This creates the classic, addictive progression curve where every upgrade promises greater power and efficiency.

Combat and Tactics: Combat is automated. When you attack another village, your troops march along a predetermined path (or you can deploy them manually in some positions) and engage enemy defenses autonomously. The player’s tactical input occurs before the battle: in the base layout (creating “pocket” zones, compartmentalizing defenses, protecting key structures) and in the composition of the attacking army (balancing cheap, fast units with strong, slow ones and the special dinosaur units). The MMOHuts review is correct that “tactics feel fairly shallow over time.” High-level play often devolves into brute-force assaults with overwhelming armies of top-tier units, rendering clever base design moot against sheer power. The promise of “tactical combat” from the ad blurb is largely unfulfilled; it is logistical escalation, not tactical maneuvering.

Innovative or Flawed Systems: The only nominal innovation is the dinosaur unit mechanic. However, sources indicate this is a simple addition to the unit roster, not a system that changes fundamental gameplay. The “Tribes” (clan) system is standard for the genre: shared resources, mutual defense pacts, and coordinated attacks. Its value is purely social, combating the isolation of the single-player experience, as noted by MMOs.com: “Having allies gives you a bit of safety and a sense of shared progress.”

The systems are, in fact, deeply flawed by design, which is a genre trait, not a bug. The free-to-play model’s constraints are the game’s defining mechanical feature. As Gamepressure states: “All activities are limited by the free-to-play model… which requires waiting for a certain amount of time to complete an action.” Construction, research, and training timers scale from minutes to days or weeks at high levels. This creates the central tension of the experience: the player’s desire for progress versus the game’s deliberate stalling. The only way to bypass this is through the in-game store, purchasing “speed-ups” or resources with real money. The MMOHuts and MMOs.com reviews both identify this as the primary flaw: “Strong pay-to-win pressure” and “excessively long” timers. This isn’t a grinding issue; it’s a monetization issue baked into the core loop. The game is designed to frustrate the patient player into spending.

User Interface: Described as “clear and understandable” (Gamepressure) and staying “readable” on both PC and mobile (MMOHuts), the UI is functional and genre-standard. Information is presented efficiently, which is a minor but critical success for a game that demands constant attention to resource counts, build queues, and incoming attacks. No major UI innovations are cited.

World-Building, Art & Sound: A Cute, Consequential Façade

Setting and Atmosphere: The setting is a “fantastic version of prehistoric times” (Gamepressure), a lighthearted, anachronistic Stone Age where cavemen wield surprisingly advanced tools and command dinosaurs. There is no attempt at anthropological or historical accuracy; the world is a playground. The atmosphere is consistently playful and accessible. The phrase “prehistoric” is used not to evoke awe or danger, but to signal a setting simple enough for children (“kid-friendly”) yet engaging for adults through the satisfaction of base-building.

Visual Direction: The game uses “colourful, drawn graphics” and “many funny animations” (Gamepressure). It is a 3D, low-polygon, cartoon-rendered style, directly comparable to Clash of Clans but with a distinct prehistoric theme. Buildings are chunky, units are oversized and comical, and dinosaurs are portrayed as loyal, mountable beasts rather than terrifying predators. This aesthetic is a deliberate strategy to downplay the violence of war (your units don’t die, they get “knocked out” and return to the barracks) and to appeal to a wider, younger audience. It creates a “low-intensity presentation” (MMOHuts) that softens the predatory nature of the PvP mechanics.

Sound Design: Almost no information is provided about sound or music in the source material. The Steambase listing shows “Audio” support is “No” for all languages listed, suggesting the game may have limited or no voice acting, relying on sound effects. The MMOHuts review lists “Music & Soundtrack” as “Coming Soon!” in its additional info, an ominous sign for a live game. This is a critical omission. A rich, thematic soundscape—crackling fires, dinosaur roars, clashing clubs—could have deeply reinforced the prehistoric fantasy. Its apparent absence or minimalism further underscores the game’s functional, template-driven nature. The world feels visually distinct but sonically empty.

The art and sound, or lack thereof, serve a single purpose: to package a standard free-to-play strategy loop in a non-threatening, broadly appealing wrapper. They contribute to the experience by lowering the thematic stakes, making the relentless grind of resource timers and PvP assaults feel less severe, like playing with action figures rather than commanding an army.

Reception & Legacy: A Mixed Send-Off into Obscurity

Critical and Commercial Reception at Launch: Critical reception is nearly non-existent in the provided sources. MobyGames shows no “Critic Reviews,” and the user review count on Steam was low for years. However, the few available contemporary user reviews, like the 10/10 from Metacritic user “karpiniek” in December 2015, praised its entertainment value relative to Clash of Clans and acknowledged its young, buggy state. The commercial model was standard free-to-play; success would be measured by player retention and microtransaction revenue, neither of which is publicly available. Its launch on Steam via Greenlight was a modest success, granting it visibility on a major PC platform.

Evolving Reputation and Shutdown: As the years passed, the player sentiment on Steam crystallized into a “Mixed” rating, with a Player Score of 56/100 based on 548 reviews (Steambase). The positive reviews likely cite the cross-platform play, the cute aesthetics, and the substantial PvE campaign as redeeming features. The negative reviews, as synthesized by MMOHuts and MMOs.com, are uniform in their criticism: pay-to-win pressures, shallow tactics, and excessively long timers. The consensus is that the game is pleasant but fundamentally flawed by the exploitative mechanics inherent to its genre and business model.

The ultimate testament to its reception is its shutdown. All sources agree: the servers closed on February 4, 2022. The mobile versions were effectively abandoned earlier, with MMOHuts noting “Mobile Version Abandoned: February 04, 2020.” This sequence—mobile launch, PC port via Greenlight, then gradual abandonment and final server death—is a grim archetype for many mid-tier free-to-play games. They operate until player numbers drop below a threshold where server costs outweigh microtransaction revenue, then are unceremoniously terminated, wiping hundreds or thousands of hours of player progress.

Influence on the Industry: Age of Cavemen left no significant, traceable influence on the industry. It was not a genre-definer like Clash of Clans or Clash Royale. It did not inspire clones. Its legacy is that of a competent but forgettable footnote. It demonstrates that simply applying a new aesthetic (prehistoric) to a proven formula is not enough to secure longevity in a saturated market. Its shutdown reinforces the precariousness of live-service games that lack a unique core loop, a dedicated community, or a publisher with deep pockets to sustain them throughplayer churn. It is a case study in the lifecycle of a live-service game: launch, plateau, decline, sunset.

Conclusion: A Fossil of a Bygone Era

Age of Cavemen is not a bad game in the traditional sense; it is a generic one. It executes the mobile-strategy template with technical competence, from its readable UI to its cross-platform functionality. Its cartoonish Stone Age aesthetic provides a momentary, superficial charm. However, it is a game utterly devoid of ambition beyond commercial replication. Its narrative is nonexistent, its depth illusory (tactics give way to power escalation), and its systems are designed explicitly to provoke spending, not strategic satisfaction.

Its six-year lifespan, ending in a quiet server shutdown, is its most telling review. In an industry increasingly wary of the “games as a service” model’s pitfalls, Age of Cavemen stands as a relic—a perfectly preserved example of the early-to-mid 2010s free-to-play boom’s least inspiring impulse: to clone, to dress up, and to monetize, with little concern for lasting player value. It is conquered, not by a superior clan, but by the relentless, unfeeling economics of the app store and Steam charts. For the historian, it is a valuable data point; for the player, it is a cautionary tale about investing time in a world built to be abandoned. Its final verdict is one of profound mediocrity: a game that did not fail, but was never meant to endure. It fulfilled its purpose as a temporary fixture in a player’s library or phone, and then, like so many of its kin, it was allowed to go extinct.