'Humankind' Tries to Reimagine Civilization, but Mostly Overcomplicates It

Humankind promises the opportunity to “re-write the entire narrative” of our species. This is a big promise, but not that far out of bounds for a 4x game that uses the vast compendium of human history for its maps, systems, and assumptions about what does or does not belong in its game world. I don’t think there is any doubt that Humankind rewrites human history, and even some of our assumptions about what a game playing in the sandbox of human history does, but its successes are tempered by both some big and small design decisions that actively hinder the experience.

It is impossible to talk about Humankind without addressing the fact that it feels like a direct response, and an attempt to overcome, the long-running Civilization series. This is Amplitude Studios’ version of the same broad concepts: empires control cities and their infrastructure as well as the armies that defend their territories; technology, religion, and culture are modes of historical “winning” and those should be taken as seriously as military victory; the control of land and the ability to marshall its resources is the core skill a player needs to have. These ideas are baked into Civilization, and Humankind’s decision to play almost exclusively in that toolbox means that it ultimately imports much of the basic ideology behind those decisions. These have been well-critiqued, and Humankind does little to swerve from the basic problems of the assumptions built into these objects.

The ways that Humankind addresses these ideas about the progress of human history are novel, though. Instead of Civilization’s empires that have you playing as George Washington and the Americans in the neolithic period in a very strange paradoxical eternal empire, Humankind breaks its game into historical eras and asks the player to choose a culture to cosplay as during each step of the way. In the Ancient Era, you might choose to be the Egyptians, and after fulfilling certain goals (which include scientific research or territorial control), you progress to the Classical era and are offered another set of cultural traits to assume. You might then choose to transform into the Greeks and pursue a scientific mode of gameplay, or you can choose the Huns and go for expansionist warfare.

Last year, in the lead up to the release of the game, this system was praised as a way of solving the 4x genre’s “biggest problem,” which is that most games in the genre ask you to make choices about your empire at the beginning of the game and then you’re stuck with that strategy. The ability to hop cultures in Humankind is thus presented as a way of allowing players to have a more granular ability to steer the big machine that is their empire into other paths toward victory.

I feel certain that this is possible, at least on a theoretical level. But Humankind is an extremely systems-heavy game, and in my time with the game I felt like there were very few big decisions like the cultural transformation system that actually made a difference for me. Instead, I mostly experienced frustration that I needed to constantly fiddle with a thousand tiny knobs to get the output that I wanted. Choosing a culture is a big decision that is minimized entirely by the fact that causing any major change requires building new structures and finding new resources that you might not have been prepared to pivot toward. More strikingly, if someone else has beaten you to the era you are leveling up to, they can lock you out of a culture you might want to transform into. If someone else across the world decided to be the Celts, you cannot be, which means that the option to pivot often feels like being forced to pivot, especially if you are in the middle of the pack in game progress.

I have the feeling that this is not a bug for both the developers and the hardcore fans of Humankind. This is a game that is geared toward those who want to slightly adjust a lot of knobs constantly. The track record is there. Amplitude’s Endless Space 2 is a notably big system, asking players to keep track of a lot of details at a lot of different social scales, from the outputs of planets to the public opinions of specific figures. While Humankind is thankfully slightly more abstract than that, it is still a game that asks you to keep a lot of disparate pieces of information in your head at any given moment, especially at difficulties above the default one. You need to know how much another culture is displacing your own, and you need to be able to make a call about how dominant you think your religion can be at the moment of its birth before you invest resources in building religious infrastructure.

In a general sense, Humankind demands that a player become a geographic tactician and a bean counter. It asks you to think supply logistics and cultural weight. While I enjoy all of these things sometimes, I am not the kind of player who enjoys all of these all of the time, and Humankind does not let you slack off that way. It demands a detailed focus toward a defined end game goal of your choosing (from the predictable stock of military, tech, etc), but the steps to get to that goal are defined by a constant watchfulness and weighting of decisions. In other words, the hardest turns of Civilization VI are the regular turns of Humankind, and it is unclear to me what the benefit of this other than celebrating how hardcore the the complexity of the thing can be. I certainly do not get more enjoyment from it. I really enjoy games like Civilization, or even Crusader Kings 3, because they allow for a broad-strokes understanding that rewards some high-level granular focus every few turns. I felt like every turn in Humankind that did not see me making visible gains in territory, trade deals, or military presence was a turn where I was losing in a material way.

Of particular frustration are the combat mechanics, which explodes the quick resolutions of Civilization VI into a full-blown miniature wargame. On one hand, they are tactical encounters that need to be taken seriously, as the “auto-resolution” mechanic is only useful if your troops are way overpowered compared to the enemy. Resolving them manually takes a couple minutes of evaluating a tactical challenge of a few troops fighting each other in hills, valleys, and rivers that all matter for combat strength. It is fiddly in a way that I just find no joy in. On the other hand, they are also weirdly rare. The majority of empires in the game seem perfectly fine to play SimCity on their own, building their cities and progressing through the stages of the game, and I rarely found myself in a combat situation that I did not initiate. That was good in that I was mostly able to just play a little city builder game putting districts and tiles together in my cities; it was bad in that it felt like there was a massive part of the game that just wasn’t taking place.

The most interesting systems in Humankind center on the cultural influence system and its related civics system. This is where you make decisions about your empire like whether religious rights are communal or personal, or whether political art is allowed or not. Each of these decisions impacts a spectrum of political valences (individualism vs collectivism; liberty vs authority). Where your empire lands on these spectrums determines how well they get along with competing empires. If the cultural influence from your empire is strong enough, or if another bordering empire has stronger cultural influence on your cities, then the civics decisions you make are reversed or altered in specific cities due to the desires of the population.

These influence systems do a lot to make it clear that my desires as a player are not necessarily the desires of my people. Pressure can come from the bottom-up and reverse what I have done. Similarly, the random events, like discovering a shipwreck or refugees appearing at the gates, allow players to make choices that can have randomized effects, really selling the idea that a player is a leader but not the final authority on the shape of the world. At its best, this can be instructive and interesting. The game has a climate system that kicks in after the industrial era begins, and in one of my earlier games I lost as a mid-level empire with little influence because the global climate disaster destabilized all of my cities and destroyed my ability to manage them. At its worst, it can create a scenario where you end up having to fight against the world, such as when cultural pressure kept presenting me with the demand to implement a slavery civic, forcing me to constantly take a governance hit on one of my cities due to my unwillingness to adopt it.

It is undeniable that this is more dynamic and specific and operable than a Civ game, but in my time with the game I have remained unconvinced that this level of fiddly knob control gives me anything unique or better than the more abstracted or zoomed out systems of a Civ. My experience of Humankind was one of seeing occasional glimmers of something special while having to fight to keep a lot of numbers and pressures in my head at once. I know that there are strategy and 4x players for whom this is where the action is. Those players love the system mastery of it all, and it's clear that the developers’ desire here was to create an abundance of complex systems that interlock beautifully. I think they accomplished that, but for me there is a point where that reaches diminishing returns, and Humankind is over that line.