Phenixx Gaming

Leading up to its release in August of 2021, Humankind was hyped up to be the downfall of the Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise. As a fairly devoted fan of the Civ series, I dare say I’m decently qualified to judge how well Humankind’s claim to the throne of the entire 4X genre has panned out. Developed by esteemed 4X developer Amplitude Studios and published by Sega, Humankind is a turn-based strategy title that aims to require players to modernize their tactics as civilization advances around them, lest players’ efforts be lost to (alternate) history. How well does Humankind accomplish its goals?

Each time you start a new game of Humankind, you’ll be expected to lead your people through multiple historical eras. To do this, you must earn a certain number of “Era Stars” (usually seven) to advance to the next era. You can earn these Era Stars by doing such things as having a certain number of population throughout your empire, researching a specific number of scientific advancements within the technology tree, and expanding your territory by establishing increasing numbers of outposts and cities. The ways you can earn Era Stars remain the same in each era.

The catch is that the rest of the world won’t wait for you to progress to each new era. Every other empire present in each round of Humankind will strive to progress as quickly as possible. If you don’t focus on keeping up with the other empires – or, preferably, modernizing faster than them – they won’t hesitate to leave you in the dust. This means you have to consistently bear in mind everything you need to do to earn Era Stars as quickly as possible. I like the fact that the methods of earning Era Stars remain consistent in light of this.

That brings me to the aspect of Humankind that has garnered the most mixed responses from players. This might also be the most difficult gameplay mechanic for me to properly explain, so bear with me. In each game of Humankind, you don’t pick a singular historical empire and stick with it for the entirety of the game. Rather, you’re intended to pick a different empire each time you progress to a new era. In other words, Humankind’s gameplay functions differently to Civilization’s idea where you play the entire game as, say, England or Rome.

In the first in-game era within Humankind, you’ll pick from a selection of the oldest historical empires, like the Zhou Dynasty of China. Then you’ll be encouraged to choose from more recent empires as you progress into more and more modern historical eras. You might start out as the Zhou Dynasty and then choose to play as what we would call “Ancient” Greece in the next era, then Byzantium in the era after that, and so on. Each progressively newer civilization you can select offers bonuses depending on your goals and what you want your empire to focus on.

You can choose to stick with your more antiquated empire if you want to, but doing so provides virtually none of the bonuses and perks you’d get from choosing a more modern empire. For example, based on which more modern empire you switched to in each era, you’ll likely get significant bonuses to things like your empire’s per-turn gold and food production. Sticking with an older civilization instead of upgrading would confer no such bonuses, mainly only gives you a small boost to your ability to win via the score victory after a certain number of turns has elapsed.

I think I see the logic behind why Humankind does this. This mechanic strongly encourages (or outright forces) players to modernize their empires to prevent them from sabotaging their chances of winning the game. After all, being forced to modernize your military with more historically recent units helps ensure you aren’t quickly eliminated from each game via military conquest. However, I dislike the fact that choosing not to upgrade your empire at every opportunity feels like such a huge handicap on that front. Humankind presents players with what’s basically the illusion of a choice in this way.

There has been quite a bit of downloadable content released for Humankind since its initial launch. I’m quite pleased to see that Humankind has something in common on this front with every other game developed by Amplitude Studios as far as I’m aware. Namely, so long as one human player in a round of Humankind owns any of its DLC, all other human players in-game alongside them will also have access to that content. Amplitude Studios is the only developer I know of that has implemented this into all their games, and I heartily commend them for doing so.

Speaking of Amplitude Studios’ other games, it seems Humankind had some beneficial work done on its online multiplayer infrastructure compared to Amplitude’s older titles, such as Endless Space 2. Some Amplitude titles are infamous for frequently causing online multiplayer networks to desynchronize in the middle of multiplayer games, which has frustrated players to no end. I know my friends and I have experienced this pretty often in Endless Space 2 specifically. However, I haven’t experienced any such issues while playing Humankind, even during several consecutive hours of participating in its online multiplayer.

I have two other major complaints about Humankind. One is that its in-game tutorials don’t do much to prevent new players from being quickly overwhelmed with information. In my experience, this is the case in Amplitude Studios’ other games as well. I understand that most 4X games expect their players to absorb quite a bit of information to play effectively. Even so, I think Humankind’s tutorials should have been paced out better to avoid giving players “information overload,” especially for players new to the 4X genre as a whole.

There are also several aspects of Humankind where crucial information isn’t necessarily made clear in my experience. For example, a friend of mine waged a successful war against an AI opponent in a round we recently played together. When that AI player sued for peace, neither my friend nor I could tell whether the AI was offering to give up some of their territory in exchange for peace or demanding territory from us for that same purpose. Even though the answer there might seem obvious given the circumstances, Humankind presented this information to us in a way that was far more confusing than it should have been.

Humankind has come a long way since its initial release. I seem to remember it didn’t exactly have stellar reviews on any platform for a while once it was out. Amplitude Studios has since put in quite a bit of work to improve the experience of playing Humankind. For the most part, Amplitude’s efforts on that front have largely paid off. Although Humankind’s overall Steam reviews are still “Mixed” at the time of writing, significant improvements have been made. That being said, though, I can’t declare Humankind the “Civilization killer” it attempted to be.

A PC review key for Humankind was provided by Sega for this review.

52

Humankind

$49.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Several interesting twists on established 4X mechanics.
• Certain gameplay aspects can make for a more beginner-friendly experience.
• Delightfully sassy narrator.
• Easily sharing DLC among all players is very convenient.

Cons

• In-game tutorials don’t do much to prevent information overload.
• Many scenarios that require players to make decisions aren’t presented clearly.