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Not So MMO: HUMANKIND Review | MMORPG.com
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Not So MMO: HUMANKIND Review | MMORPG.com
Strategy games have come a long way, and Amplitude aims to push it further with Humankind, their latest 4X offering. But how does it stack up and does it do anything meaningful to help push the 4X genre along?
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Just sign up for Game Pass for $1 and play it there.
I've been playing it since it came out and I still can't find a reason to keep playing it over the Civ series honestly.
There is a religion system in the game. That being said I picked shamanism(religion bonus based on population), as my first religion choice, built a single temple, and 50 turns later I received the achievement for one world religion. My generic "shamanism" took over the world with me clicking twice. This about sums up every single system in the game so far. I want to love the game, but not one single system has any real depth to it.
Lets start with who this game is for. This game was designed for 4x strat fans. Many of the jokes in the game won't make sense to people who haven't played civ and pretty much every feature feels like a discord discussion I've had with 4x fans about what they don't like about x game.
As far as 4X games go they tend to either be very simple, relatively speaking, to attract large player bases such as civilization series, or very complex, Master of Orion series. This game sits smack in the middle. Its got a lot more depth to its systems then civilization does, but a very simple UI that makes it less intimidating to starting players as it directs you to the most important stuff. Unlike most 4x game it has a player controlled combat system and features heavy use of strategic positioning using terrain and good mixes of unit types. Overall the top feature of this 4x game is the UI. From the best notification system I have seen in a strategy game, to the helpful search bar in the tech tree the developers nailed how to make a 4x UI. And for all of you who have 1K+ hours in civ 6 alone, you will have a tingly feeling every time the computer turn takes less than a second (the longest one I saw was maybe 5 seconds).
Now for the bad stuff. The biggest fault I have found is how much the computer sucks at combat. It does not make use of the terrain or city walls effectively and can easily be baited into bad situations. Generally if you can pick where the battle will occur so that you have good terrain you can beat vastly stronger armies. The second biggest issue is the incomplete encyclopedia. There are several concepts in the game, where the UI does not provide you with all of the information there is. This is pretty typical for a 4X game as there is a lot to cram into that UI but most of the time there is a full encyclopedia to cover up that issue. While humankind has one its missing some pretty obvious areas such as what the grievances are and do, and what vassalage really does.
The game does have some balance issues that need to be worked out but the bugs mentioned in the review I have not encountered. The biggest balance issues are:
1. Luxury's are OP, you will probably have no stability or gold issues no matter how you play as long as you make as many friends as possible and buy every luxury you can.
2. The war system works on using grievances to gain war support, its a very clever system that is designed to stop militaristic strats from snowballing as is common in most 4x games, that said there is a big loophole. Certain grievances, the main one being trespassing can be declared dropped and redeclared indefinitely leading to instant max war support. This is particularly easy to do as general when you finish a war they will still have units in your territory, or freshly conquered territory.
3. Some of the civs are op and some just suck but learning that is the fun of playing so I won't spoil.
All in all the faults and balance issues should be fixable and this game really has the potential to be a major shift in 4x games. May of the leaders of this genre have gotten stale and lazy in their development of new features, UI, and basic systems and an outsider like this will hopefully shake things up.
There is a lot of stuff in this game that will feel similar to the endless series. Like legends there are a bunch of balance issues at launch but given their history they likely will fix them. That said I did not like the Endless series mostly because i found the UI to be overly complicated with too many features that had hidden mechanics. I find that they learned a lot from that when making this game.
Reading about the combat AI took that excitement away however, especially since you play an active part in it.
Knowing the studio they will be releasing several expansions and improvements so I will be picking it up in a year or so for sure. Thanks for the insights!
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
That's really interesting because if someone would ask me what I like most about the Endless series I would have said 'The beautiful, clean, funtional UI' So considering that I already liked the old UI a lot I should love Humankinds UI then
Every single endless game has been gold and this has been the same feels.
The maps are tiny (even the "Huge" one), the AI is dumber than sticks (not seen them in a ship yet... not once!, and the end game is you on an island building up cities because you cleared out the dumb AI early and the rest are on another continent fighting each other and not caring about you at all.
Oh, and they love to spam you with "Be my ally" every damn turn!
No trials. No tricks. No traps. No EU-RP server. NO THANKS!
...10% Benevolence, 90% Arrogance in my case!