Game:

Humankind (2021)

Duration: 1:00:11

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Humankind (Metacritic 80%)

is a 4X game comparable to the Civilization series. Players lead their civilization across six major eras of human civilization, starting from the nomadic age, directing how the civilization should expand, develop cities, control military and other types of units as they interact with other civilizations on the virtual planet, randomly generated at the start of a new game. A distinguishing feature of Humankind is that within each of the eras, the player selects one of ten civilization types based on historical societies; this selection offers both bonuses and penalties to how the player can build out the civilization. Because a player can select different civilizations as a template to build upon, there exists potentially one million different civilization patterns that a player can ultimately develop.

Building out cities follows a similar model from Amplitude's Endless Legend game, a continent in Humankind will have multiple territories on it, and the player will only be able to build one city in that territory. Over time, they can expand that city, adding farms and other outlying resources as well as more dense urban areas closer to the city center. This allows the creation of large metropolises within each territory. Players may also need to engage in combat with enemy forces. When this occurs, the game uses a tactical role playing game approach for detailed resolution of these battles, giving the player a chance to take advantage of terrain and special abilities of their units.Within these skirmishes, battles can only last for three combat turns before the game returns to the overworld, such that drawn-out wars can occur across multiple years at the overworld scale.

During the game, the player gains resources for their civilization, similar to Endless Legend, which includes food, industry, gold, science, and influence; each of these can be spent to speed up production, advance technology, or as trade goods with other cultures. Humankind also includes Fame, which is earned by being the first civilization to discover certain technologies or build world wonders. Fame remains a persistent measure of the civilizations relative success to other civilizations, and can have impacts on later decisions in the game. Unlike games like Civilization where there can be multiple victory conditions, victory in Humankind is based solely on the Fame score after a pre-determined number of turns. Humankind will include certain persons and events based on historical records that the player will interact with.

Development
Amplitude Studios has had a history of prior 4X games based on its Endless science fiction setting, including Endless Space and Endless Legend. The studio considers Humankind to be their magnum opus of their previous titles, and something that they have wanted to produce from the start, with their recent acquisition by Sega helping to make Humankind possible.

Humankind had been teased by Sega earlier in 2019, with the game formally announced during the August 2019 Gamescom. The game had an exclusive 7-day demo available on Stadia, starting on October 21, 2020.

Amplitude held periods of open beta testing across late 2020 and early 2021, called "OpenDev" phases, giving players the opportunity to try limited scenarios and provide feedback for improving the game.

While the game was planned for an April 2021 release, Amplitude pushed the release into August 2021 to facilitate final polishing of the game.During this time, Amplitude announced they would not include Denuvo digital rights management software in the game. While they had intended to use Denuvo to help protect their game, data collected during the OpenDev phases found that Denuvo negatively impacted the performance of the game, and opted to remove the software.

Reception
Leana Hafer of IGN awarded the game 7/10, stating :"Humankind is an interesting but fairly safe riff on historical 4X that doesn't always rise to meet its potential."