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Aug 16, 2021 · Humankind. Image Credit: Amplitude Studios. Humankind exudes confidence in the way that it brings fully fleshed out elements for a short time in each game before doing away with them. During...
Aug 17, 2021 · Humankind Reviews - Metacritic. Humankind is different than other games and that's fine. It builds on the authors' experiences with the genre, but may differ too much for the massive success of the brand and the studio. It's an interesting title that will find countless players and fans, but it does too little for big success. Read More.
- (60)
- E10+
Jul 5, 2022 · I was really interested in this game as I am a fan of Amplitude games. The first information I got about this game and the first screenshots and short videos I saw, suggested that the game was more an action dungeon crawler with rogue-like elements rather than the tactic puzzle we can find in Dungeo
- Cutting deals and blending cultures in an intriguing, but not world-changing historical 4X.
- What's your favorite way to leave your mark on history?
- Humankind Review Screenshots
- Verdict
By Leana Hafer
Updated: Mar 21, 2022 6:40 pm
Posted: Aug 16, 2021 2:00 pm
I don't want to spend an entire review comparing Humankind to Sid Meier's Civilization, but it's very clear that this is Amplitude's riff on that classic 4X melody. While I was delighted by some genuine improvements and innovations on my turn-based march from the Stone Age to the Space Age, most of the basics felt pretty familiar. And more than once, that left me wishing it had pushed the boundaries a bit more, like the studio's previous Endless Space and Endless Legend games did.
One of my favorite little new ideas in Humankind is the Neolithic Era, which starts each run with a small band of nomadic hunter-gatherers who have to collect enough food or science to advance and become a settled society. I enjoyed this unorthodox playstyle so much that I wished I could have spent more time with it, or even remained nomadic. But you eventually settle into a more traditional 4X routine of expanding cities through districts to collect food, science, production, and cash, against up to nine other AI or human-controlled empires.
There are two new resources that mix things up a little. Influence limits how much you can expand externally and spreads your culture to neighboring cities, while stability limits how much you can expand internally, as urban centers that sprawl out further and further become more difficult to govern. These considerations made planning out my empire's path to prosperity an interesting and often challenging puzzle. As a chill tile-painting game in which I can watch my civilization spread across the gorgeous world map, Humankind stands up well against its competition.
Conquest and war
Science and technology
Art and culture
Infrastructure and industry
Lots and lots of babies
Other - tell us in the comments
The other headline feature is that you'll be choosing a different culture for every era, rather than one that sticks with you through the ages. I really liked this on a mechanical level. For one thing, it means you have a unique unit every era, instead of only for a small part of each campaign. The design of these units and bonuses felt very safe, though. There's nothing as wild or game-changing as some of the more out there civ and leader abilities in Civ 5 and 6, and they typically just provide new ways to generate resources. However, since cultures all have niches like Expansionist or Scientist, you can focus on a different playstyle every era, which is nice in a long campaign where you might get bored of being type-cast as a warlord or a brainiac. And that won't hamstring you, since victory is based on a Fame system that adds up all of your deeds, from conquest to building the biggest cities.
There's nothing as wild or game-changing as some of the more out there civ and leader abilities in Civ 5 and 6.
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There is a religion system, but only just. Like the era bonuses for each culture, the bonuses you can add to your faith are mostly simple modifiers to resource generation or modest military buffs. Religion only spreads passively, and unless I was looking for a reason to go to war, I usually forgot it existed. There is a kind of interesting late-game wrinkle in that you can pursue tolerant secularism or militant state atheism, modeling changing ideas about the nature of the universe. The problem is, while this is cool for roleplaying and can generate new conflicts in the case of atheism, it felt like taking away some of my toys since neither of these belief systems get anything to replace holy sites or tenet bonuses.
The culture system also doesn't exactly solve the roleplaying problem of telling a coherent, historical story like I’d hoped it might. Sure, we could say my Khmer realm was conquered by the Ming Empire when I chose them as my next culture, but where did these Chinese bureaucrats come from? Were they hiding in the forest? Outer space? They weren't on the map anywhere before I decided to play as them. This is of course, no siller than Civ's version of this same problem where you have American tribesmen founding the city of Washington D.C. in 4,000 BCE. But it's not necessarily a lot more logical, either.
I was also fairly disappointed with the late game. There is an event chain related to climate change, but in my games it only cost what was at that point less than one turn's worth of income to avoid any consequences at all. And even ignoring it completely only gives you a -30 to all resource production in your cities for 10 turns, which isn’t much by the time it comes up. The map doesn't even change to reflect rising sea levels or growing deserts. Similarly, there is a Pollution mechanic that kicks in once coal becomes available, but hell if I know what it does. The tooltip doesn't explain it. There's no encyclopedia entry about it. And even when I was trying to produce as much of it as possible in my Soviet run to find out, it never got above "Level 0" or had any effect on anything. Downplaying the climate crisis in any game about humanity's near future is not only factually incorrect – it's also really boring game design, giving up on the chance to mix things up and introduce new challenges at a point when you're probably just taking victory laps.
I don't dislike Humankind – far from it. But as the sun sets on my attractive empire, I'm not that impressed with it either. It certainly has some strong ideas, and the diplomacy system, at least in theory, is excellent. I loved the flexibility of being able to specialize in something different with each new culture I adopted. But especially agains...
Aug 16, 2021 · But Amplitude Studios has spent a decade preparing to rewrite that myth. Humankind is the result: a massive, history-spanning behemoth that's kept me on its hooks until sunrise a few times.
- Online Editor
- Fraser Brown
Aug 17, 2021 · Humankind is the newest game in the 4X genre, coming to us from veteran 4X developer Amplitude Studios. Its previous titles, Endless Space and Endless Legend, have been positively received, but the studio has said that they see Humankind as their magnum opus.
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