An outpost takes a few turns to get constructed, which I appreciated. Anyway, explore other curiosities to gain “Influence”: if you gain enough, you can found an outpost, which you can later grow into a city. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity that the game refers to all of your units as being part of your army, even in this early era. Gain enough Food, and another unit (set of figures) will be added to “your army”. You can also manually control combat, at which point you manoeuvre your units around a small battlefield and try to defeat the opposing forces.īy exploring “food curiosities” and hunting animals, you gain Food. When engaging in combat, you can choose to auto-resolve, which gives you the outcome of the battle immediately. Hunting animals is the game’s way of introducing you to the combat mechanics. Your “nomadic hunter-gatherers” rove from tile to tile, hunting animals and exploring “curiosities”. This early phase of the game is also a little weird in that it follows different rules from the rest of the game. The narration, though, is terrible, with a jokey tone that seems at odds with the rest of the game. The game looks great, with beautiful artwork throughout. It could also be easily solved by simply referring to this starting “era” as the Stone Age. If you claim to be inspired by history, this sets the wrong tone directly at the start and I am not sure why this decision was made in the first place. Why then does the game start off with a “nomadic tribe” of “hunter-gatherers”? Or to swap things around: why does the game insist on starting during the “Neolithic Era” rather than, say, the Mesolithic or even earlier, the Palaeolithic. One of the characteristics of the Neolithic, to put it very briefly, is the domestication of plants and animals, and the emergence of farming and settled villages. However, there is a problem: in the top left corner, the game specifies that we are currently in the “Neolithic Era”. When you start the game, you begin in control of a “nomadic tribe”, described as “a society of hunter-gatherers living in temporary settlements”. The other players in the game, either human (in an online game) or AI, are referred to as “competitors”. Instead, you create an avatar, a figure who will represent you as you play the game. In Civilization, you start the game by picking a leader, like Julius Caesar of the Romans or George Washington of the Americans. For most, it probably won’t be the “ Civ-killer” that some have touted it to be, but it’s definitely worth your time if you’re interested in historical strategy games and/or the reception of the past in new media. Because even though the game has some major flaws, it is still interesting because of the choices that the developers have made. However, Humankind did linger in the back of my mind and when it was finally released on 17 August 2021, I decided I wanted to return to it and write up a more in-depth review of the game. I wrote about the game in the article I mentioned earlier, after I had dabbled in the demo that was available on Google Stadia, and concluded then that the game was not for me. victory), from the Neolithic era all the way into the contemporary era. The subject of the present review is Humankind, a turn-based strategy game inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization series of games, where the player is tasked to lead their faction to greatness (i.e. Or we should really try to make our own games: that is certainly something that I am currently devoting some of my time to.įor now, though, let’s stick to critiquing and discussing historical games. The choices they make are interesting, because they often reveal what kinds of ideas about past societies are widespread enough to be incorporated into a game.Ī lot of the time, outdated ideas and concepts resurface in games: those instances should be a call to action on the part of academically-trained professionals, historians and archaeologists alike, to try and get more involved with the process of creating and designing games. Game developers typically don’t have an academic background in history or archaeology, and so they must rely on their own research or advisors when it comes to emulating aspects of the past. Anecdotally, there are lots of players who profess to have been inspired to read more about the past after being engrossed by games like Civilization or Age of Empires. Games can be a fun way to introduce people to history. In November of last year, I wrote an article with some of my thoughts on historical strategy games. This article was originally published on the defunct Ancient World Magazine website and is now re-published here.
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