Humankind is a 4x turn-based strategy game published by SEGA and developed by Amplitude Studios. In the game players advance through the eras of human evolution, controlling different cultures from many time periods, each with a variety of playstyles. A game takes place over 300 turns as players compete against each other to become the greatest empire.

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Humankind's scoring system is fame. Fame is earned in many different ways, including achieving goals in every era to earn fame and stars, which allow the player to progress through eras. Since its release, the game has received high praise from both players and critics alike, being hailed as a vast improvement to the usual 4x games. There are many reasons to both enjoy or dislike this game.

10 Didn't Love: Infrastructures & Festivals

Key city resources

The Infrastructures that can be built in each city provide a permanent bonus to certain parts of the city. For example, the Infrastructure 'Flood Irrigation' gives +2 food on rivers. Likewise, Festivals take a few turns of constructing and then reward a payout depending on the type of festival, including faith, gold, and science.

Unfortunately, these are many of these infrastructures and festivals are rather lackluster. While these festivals give a payout at the end of construction, it's often better to build districts to simply increase that resources generation per turn. The same goes for many of the infrastructures which only add resources onto the main plaza of a city. These are issues that could both be easily fixed.

9 Loved: Culture Selection

Culture selection screen

With the beginning of each new era being marked by a new culture selection, it's important for each culture to be unique and individual, while also representing that civilization. Humankind does this perfectly. While at first, it may seem to have sorted cultures into one of 7 categories depending on what it works to achieve, whether it's religion, science, or population and growth, the game does an incredible job of using these affinities.

Each culture fits perfectly into its chosen affinity, with a unique trait that will work with others in its group, or those that aren't. Each culture has its own emblematic unit and quarter that exemplify the history of the culture, from Greek Hoplites to English Strongholds. The affinity categories are an excellent addition, as showing what a culture excels at, making the choice at the start of every era slightly easier.

8 Didn't Love: Religion

Humankind Tenets

Religion is an unfortunate addition to the didn't love a list as there is nothing wrong with it in the game. A city generates faith and uses that to convert nearby cities, meaning merged territories have greater reach. As the religion gains more followers, Tenets can be unlocked which can provide bonuses to resource yield throughout territories following the religion.

While a religion-focused game can be fun, there isn't much to it. Spreading happens mostly passively, and no cultures give any benefit to faith production. The Teutons benefit from having faith, but don't provide any way to better gain it. There is also no active part to gaining religion, such as sending out missionaries, or some kind of holy unit that can spread the word of a player's religion.

7 Loved: Auto-Save Functions

Technology Tree

This benefit may seem like a very strange one as it comes with a minor drawback to it, however, the game has included a highly useful auto-save function. This function can come in handy if the game experiences a glitch or bug that requires a quick restart of the game.

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In the options menu, Auto-save has a number of options that can be swapped around. The frequency of auto-saves allows players to control how often a save occurs, while the number of auto-saves controls how many saves are stored before the game begins to overwrite them. A good choice for these is every 3 turns with 50 saves total, which allows half a game to be saved, however, these can be altered as needed.

6 Didn't Love: Earning Fame Stars

Humankind Era Stars

The game progresses by having players earn stars by hitting certain milestones throughout an era. Once enough stars have been earned, the player can advance onto the next era, selecting their next culture and awarding them fame in doing so.

One small downside is that the stars are all earned the same way in every era, such as earning technologies, claiming territories, earning gold, or having large populations. These remain the same throughout each era, so it may have been more interesting if Amplitude Studios included era-specific or even culture-specific stars.

5 Loved: The Wonders

humankind_cultural_wonder-1

The Wonders are an important aspect of any 4x game based around history as they are easily identifiable places that provide huge bonuses to whoever builds them. As such, they need to be iconic, and they should also fit inappropriately. Unlike the Civilization games, which feature a great number of wonders, Humankind only features 22.

These wonders can be extremely powerful, with each providing multiple large benefits to different resources. The biggest benefits can come from building a lot of wonders, which can easily be achieved with large influence and industry production.

4 Didn't Love: Straightforwardness

humankind island civilization

Sadly, Humankind may appear more simplistic than some of its counterparts in terms of gameplay mechanics. However, it could be argued that these mechanics end up very repetitive in the 300 turns a game lasts.

This isn't to say that it ruins the game, but picking a science culture in the ancient era then continuing with science the entire game makes a very rinse and repeat style experience during every era. The only thing that shakes the game up is the threat of war, but a military presence stops this. Additionally, wonders are claimed by spending influence, unlike Civilization, where a player could be one turn away from building it when an opponent snatches it up just before.

3 Loved: Combat

humankind heal units

The usual 4x strategy game has a very basic combat system. Usually, these games work by having units have a percentage chance of winning based on various modifiers and then randomly assigning damage based on these factors.

Humankind changes the game by making combat much more interactive, allowing players to move their units around a 'battlefield' to attack enemy units. These manual battles allow a unique twist on strategy combat which can make even the most unwinnable battle at least survivable, and push the game into being one of the year's best strategy games.

2 Didn't Love: Resources

Humankind City with outposts

The resources chosen in the game seem a perfect fit and make sense with the technology within the game. There are only a few minor complaints that some fans may have with them.

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Despite the random generation of the world in the game, more often than not, certain resources such as uranium and oil will be heavily underrepresented, while many luxury resources will be far too easy to find. This unfortunate aspect of the game can make the later game rather annoying as it can be difficult to acquire oil, which is a very important resource for the late game.

1 Loved: The Simplicity

Zoomed out, tactical map view

Humankind is a game that should appeal to newcomers to the genre especially since it appears on Xbox Game Pass. It appears much less intimidating than games such as the Civilization series. Humankind guides its players throughout the game, and options allow for the game to be made easier, including preventing enemies from declaring wars.

For long-time fans of strategy games, this isn't a downside, as the options allow for making the game much more difficult as well. This means that both brand new and existing fans can both equally enjoy the game.

Humankind was released on August 17, 2021, and is available on PC and Google Stadia.

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