Humankind Review

This year has been quite interesting for historical 4X strategy games, with plenty of new titles popping up to carve out their own place in the subgenre. Mohawk Games' Old World released with moderate success and now Amplitude Studios is taking its turn with Humankind. Are Humankind's offerings up to the task? Will they usher in a new age of strategy games based on historical strategies?

Humankind lets players play the role of a small Neolithic tribe of humans. Their goal is to create a civilization that has the greatest impact on the world, and will be immortalized in the history books. By accumulating victory points, also known as fame, empires can achieve certain achievements such as building structures, fighting wars and improving their scientific prowess. This simple victory points system is flexible and thematic. It accentuates Humankind’s emerging story-telling and is refreshingly different to the firaxis-esque and specific victory conditions.

Amplitude Studios is known for their excellent presentation. Humankind has been a great example of that. The game's graphics are vibrant, bright, and inspiring. However, it retains a sense of reality in its visual design. It is amazing to see how cities change over time, as the players progress through the ages. There are new structures and districts that conform to the terrain in stunning fashion.

Although the maps are stunning and extremely detailed, it can be difficult to read the smaller elements such as stone fields or woodlands. Hidden passes and lines of cliffs can be difficult to see. Humankind would benefit from additional UI options to highlight these cliffs, such as Gladius: Relics Of War.

It's a UI perspective, it's simple and responsive, with intuitive controls and collapsible options. There are also a lot of tooltips to help reduce overwhelm. While there are some annoyances, inefficiencies, and the occasional difficulty reading unit information in tactical combat, the overall experience is very user-friendly.

Audio design is excellent, with exquisite music, solid ambience and sound effects for each unit. It is as good as Civilization's incredible score. It is especially impressive in its melodic compositions and breadth of sound.

Amplitude's game was packed with incredible presentation. But, that's not the case for Humankind's modes. Single-player offers only one campaign mode. However, it is highly customizable in terms of resource abundance and geographical features. Multiplayer supports up to 10 players per match. However, the absence of other multiplayer options like hotseat or play-by-email is a strange oversight, given the game's production value and the history of the dev team.

In a game that aims to give players as many options and choices as possible, the lack of additional modes is limiting player choice and flexibility. Amplitude has added a sharing and character creation system that allows players to customize their avatars and AI behavior. This adds an interesting community-sharing option and adds an extra challenge.

Its innovative gameplay systems are undoubtedly Humankind's greatest highlights. While there are many hallmarks to a 4X strategy video game, three key features stand out: combat, cultural evolution and emergent storytelling.

Amplitude took ten years to change their combat system from passive to active command system. Now they have finally found the right formula. The tactical combat system functions in a similar way to Endless Legend. When two belligerent armies meet up, rather than shifting to a new perspective, the tactical battle takes places on the strategic map within a defined area. Humankind encourages active participation, not like Endless Legend, where players give orders to their units, then passively watch as the AI does the work. Instead, the player can direct unit movement and actions.

This subgenre isn't new in its behavior and actions, but this way of fighting with armies of troops on the strategic map is engaging and fun. It's especially exciting in the later stages. Humankind's tactical AI is competent, but the strategic AI doesn't have the same qualities.

While the combat AI may make blunders from time to time, it will most often show aggression and pressure weaker units. It will also take defensive positions when necessary. Although it isn't perfect, combat AI is far more engaging than other 4X games. A unique twist on combat is the cost of units. This adds an extra layer of strategic consideration to fighting wars as losing units can directly impact an empire’s economic performance.

Humankind's culture evolution system is the most important innovation for the 4X subgenre. Players are no longer limited to one culture or civilization throughout the game. However, that option is still available. Instead, players can evolve into any of the ten cultures offered by each era as they progress through the six periods. Players can choose their culture and transform fully into it. However, any legacy traits from previous cultures will still be preserved. This allows the player to build their own civilization out of a mix of other cultures.

This historical approach is much more realistic due to the large time span that the game uses. The evolution system offers players a wide range of strategic options and paths to choose from in order to build the greatest empire. This system also allows players to be flexible, making the game more engaging from a moment to moment. It also facilitates emergent storytelling, light role-playing, and other important features of strategy gaming.

Humankind is a strong believer in storytelling. While random events and event chain mechanics can help with storytelling, it is the game's spirit, collection of mechanics, and the challenge of combat that does most of the work. Friendly and sarcastic narrator is also a great help in luring players to the misery of their fellow citizens.

Technology, technology, cities, exploration, resource management and civics are all functional, but not exceptional in their own right. These systems are not overly complex or innovative so those who have been familiar with the subgenres will feel right at home.

Two systems don't work well: diplomacy and religion. The experience of religion is bland, superficial, and undercooked. This is surprising considering the variety of options available, even those with less innovative mechanisms. Diplomacy is, however, more limited than in other 4X games. This comes from Humankind's larger issues, which is how it transmits information.

Many mechanics and actions are not explained in sufficient detail or not covered at all, leading to frustration and confusion. Amplitude does include an in-game dictionary, but it is not well organized and the search bar isn't very functional. This makes it more frustrating to check concepts and features.

Humankind's biggest problems are its inconsistency and pacing. This is mostly due to easy resource exploitation, and certain cultures are clearly more powerful than others.

It's easy to snowball too soon, which unintentionally dumbs down and shortens the strategic challenge of this game. The poor strategic AI is definitely not helping. After gaining so much gold, I was disinterested in two playthroughs. This is likely to be a matter of changing some number around so I am confident that Amplitude will reduce this issue in the future.

These issues can also contribute to the game's uneven pacing, which will see periods of slowing down and then bursts full of exciting and intense action. The AI turns are a little slow so players may need to wait until the next turn begins before they can make their moves. Humankind is not able to live up the constant addictive nature of Civilization.

There are also some puzzling missed opportunities, which go against Humankind's historical authenticity as well as Amplitude's own experience. It is disappointing that there are no heroes, great people or generals. This is especially surprising considering that characters in almost every Amplitude 4X game play crucial strategic and tactical roles. Apart from random events and climate, Humankind doesn't have weather or climate. This makes snowballing easier and goes against the game’s goal to allow the player to make flexible decisions.

Although Humankind is technically polished and has a solid options menu it is still baffling that advanced graphics options are not available with only presets. I did not experience any frame drops, performance problems, bugs or crashes. So players with recommended specs should be able run Humankind without too much difficulty. Although the loading screens can be annoyingly slow, I did experience some animation issues where units would become stuck in combat actions. Fortunately this was temporary.

Amplitude's classic 4X strategy game, Humankind, is fun and entertaining. It has great production values and some refreshing ideas. Although the game could be great, there are a few minor issues that make it difficult to recommend. However, the game feels solid and has plenty of potential for improvement. The game is recommended to 4X and historic strategy fans. Casual and undecided players should wait for major content updates.