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. Does Humankind's offering stand up to scrutiny, and ushers in a new era historical strategy games?

Humankind has a small Neolithic-based human tribe that players can take as their leader. The goal is to build the most influential civilization in history and make it the best. The Empire achieves this by building and maintaining a reputation, accumulating victory point called fame and performing specific actions. This simple victory point system, which is flexible and thematic, greatly enhances Humankind’s emergent storytelling and is also refreshing in comparison to the more precise victory conditions of Firaxis Civilization series.

Amplitude Studios does one thing well: the presentation. Humankind is no exception. The game's visual design is awe-inspiring and vibrant. It's incredible to see how cities change as players advance through the ages. You can see new structures and districts forming in amazing ways to match the terrain.

The maps are breathtakingly beautiful and well-detailed, but they can also be quite overwhelming and difficult to read. This is especially true for smaller elements like stone fields and woods, which can be easily missed. Humankind could also benefit from additional options for UI to highlight hidden passes and line of cliffs.

The UI is clean and responsive. It features simple and intuitive controls, collapsible navigations, and a good amount of tooltips. This helps to minimize feeling overwhelmed. There are some minor annoyances and inefficiencies that may occur, like the difficulty in reading unit info in tactical combat. But overall, it's not too difficult.

It is also a great audio design, featuring beautiful and inspiring music as well as solid ambience and unit sounds effects. The music is exceptional and could easily compete with Civilization's extraordinary score. The non-culture-specific ambient music is exceptional in its melodic compositions, and breadth.

Amplitude was able to present their game with a beautiful presentation. However, this is not true for Humankind's modes. Single-player can only access one campaign mode. But, single-player is very customizable in geographic features and resource abundance. Multiplayer allows up to 10 players to play in a match. But, it is unusual that there aren't more multiplayer options, like hotseat, play-by email, and other staples of this subgenre, due to the game's production quality and the dev team’s experience.

This limits the options available to players in a game that strives to offer as much freedom and choice as possible for its history. Amplitude added an extensive avatar creation and sharing system to allow players to customize their empire's avatar as well as their AI behavior. This provides a unique community-sharing option that adds challenge and longevity to the game.

Humankind's most significant highlights are its unique gameplay systems. Although there are all the classic characteristics of a 4X-style strategy game, there are three highlights that are worth mentioning: combat and cultural evolution.

Amplitude spent ten year trying to make a simple, passive change to their combat system to become an active command system. They've finally succeeded. The tactical combat system works in the same way as Endless Legend. Instead of shifting to a different perspective when two belligerent armies come together, the tactical battle is held on the strategic maps within a specific area. Humankind encourages active players participation. The player is able to direct the movement and actions of their units unlike Endless Legend, which allows them to give orders and then sit back and watch passively while the AI does the rest.

Although the subgenre's units act and behave the same, this method of combating with armies, which involves troops being unpacked on a strategic map, is quite unique and exciting, particularly in the latter stages. Humankind's tactical AI is very competent, although the strategic AI does not have that same quality.

Although it may occasionally make stupid decisions, the combat AI will show aggression and pressure weaker troops more often than others. When necessary, it can also defend itself. It isn't perfect but it is far more effective than other 4X games. This makes combat extremely engaging and challenging. Another interesting aspect to combat is that units are cost-based. This increases the strategic importance of fighting wars and will impact the economic performance of an empire.

Humankind's culture-evolution system is the flagship innovation offered to the historic 4X subgenre. Players don't have to remain in the same civilization or culture for the duration of the game, although that option is still possible. Instead, as they progress through six eras, players are allowed to become one of the ten available cultures per era. Once they choose their culture, all legacy traits will be retained. Players are able to build their own civilization by combining the best elements of several cultures.

This way of looking at history is much more real due to its large time span. The evolution system provides players with a multitude of strategic choices and paths they can follow in their quest to be the most successful empire. This system also allows players the ability to adapt in a constant manner, which is a great feature for strategy gaming.

Humankind, in particular, is more concerned with storytelling than other players in the 4X strategy area. The mechanics of random events or event chains can be helpful in telling the story, but the spirit of the game and its collection, including the culture evolution system, and challenging combat, do most of it. It's also helped by the friendly, sarcastic and funny narrator who helps players understand the perils of their people.

While the major systems of technology, infrastructure, cities, world wonders and exploration are functional, they are not unique in their own ways. These systems are not complex or innovative and will make veterans feel at ease with what's available.

Two systems are not so successful: diplomacy or religion. Religion is dull, uninspired, and often undercooked. It's surprising given all the options available to you, even if they are not as innovative. Diplomacy, on the other hand, feels less flexible than in other 4X game modes. A lot of this can be attributed to Humankind's main problem: how it communicates information.

A lot of actions and mechanics are unclearly described or not explained at all. This can cause confusion and frustration. Amplitude included an in-game encyclopedia. However, it's not organized in a very efficient manner. The search bar isn’t working well either, making it difficult to check concepts or features.

Humankind's main problems aside from its inept play are its inconsistent pace and balance. The lack of balancing results mainly from resource exploitation. Some cultures also have more power than others.

It feels too easy to snowball early which inadvertently dulls down the strategic challenge and unintentionally reduces it. With the poor quality strategic AI, this is certainly not helping. Due to having so much gold to play with, I became disinterested from two playthroughs. This can be corrected by Amplitude.

This balance issue also leads to inconsistent pacing. There will be slow periods followed by fast, exciting bursts. Not to mention that AI turns can take a significant amount of time, so players might need a bit more time before making their moves. Humankind cannot live up to Civilization’s constant addictive nature.

There are also a few baffling missed opportunities which contradict some of Humankind’s historical authenticity, and Amplitude’s own experiences. This is a major oversight, particularly considering the fact that characters are important strategic or tactical roles in nearly every Amplitude 4X product. Aside from random events, Climate and Weather are absent in Humankind. This makes snowballing much easier and goes against Humankind's goal of encouraging flexibility in decision-making.

The technical aspect of Humankind is good. It has an excellent options menu and is well-designed. But, it is strange that the advanced graphics options only have presets. I haven't experienced any major frame drops, performance issues or bugs. Anyone who meets the recommended specs should be capable of running Humankind. The loading screens are a little too long, and I experienced some animation problems where units got stuck performing an action during combat. But that was only temporary.

Amplitude's 4X strategy game Humankind is a great historical game. The production values are excellent and the ideas are fresh. While the game is close to being amazing, there are some moderate issues. As it stands, however, it feels like a strong foundation with lots of room to improve. Humankind can be a strong recommendation for 4X and historical strategist enthusiasts. Casual and undecided players should however wait for major content updates.