Puny Stupid Humans Review

As tempting as it would be for me to simply copy and paste one of my numerous other reviews of Clash of Clans-inspired games and swap out the proper nouns, Puny Stupid Humans does put in more effort than the games that truly deserve that level of laziness. An amusing theme saves this otherwise generic strategy game.

When aliens land on prehistoric Earth, naturally they are scared and confused. But, like the evil invaders they ultimately are, soon they begin terraforming their crash site into a futuristic headquarters and conscripting the vicious local wildlife to their cause. If that sounds suspiciously familiar then congratulations because you’ve successfully deduced that this is yet another game about building a base, improving its defenses against lesser hordes, managing freemium currency, and raising an army to take on real-time strategy missions and other players online. How novel.

But as its title foreshadows, Puny Stupid Humans milks enough cleverness out of its stranded aliens premise to give it at least some personality. There is legitimately humorous banter between the dopey overlords as well as some fun fourth wall-breaking moments involving their mind control device. The mechanism is actually a living creature aware of the player's presence and finds it deliciously ironic that there's another force controlling the ones who think they are in control.

The game also uses the ancient Earth environment in some neat ways. When players begin conquering they’ll start capturing furry, Bigfoot-esque, pre-evolved humans as soldiers. However, as the years go by they'll enter new historical eras and use their advanced armies to make appropriate political alliances. But if you're worried that the broad swathes of history covered might be too visually disparate, the angular and well-animated 3D graphics keep things consistently cartoony with a nice sci-fi tinge.

No one would blame you for not wanting to play yet another game with the ubiquitous mobile strategy formula Puny Stupid Humans uses. But as far as those games go, at least this one is pretty entertaining.