Humankind

In this slick, speedy 4X, you’ve got to get famous or die trying

You start Humankind as a nomadic tribe in the Neolithic era. The wilderness around you holds pockets of treasure: a resource deposit here, a volcanic pool there. As I move my tribe across the map I’m rewarded for discovering the Great Blue Hole, a circular underwater ravine. I’m discovering the world, and I haven’t built my first settlement yet.

Amplitude’s strategy games have been getting better and better since the studio formed in 2011. The EndlessSpace series introduced some truly bizarre factions to the space 4X formula, but Humankind owes more to the studio’s fantasy game, EndlessLegend.Humankind has many similar features, in the way that your cities grow district by district, and battles taking place across multiple hexes in a minigame that asks you to make tactical decisions to hopefully outwit the AI – more than just two hexes rolling dice against each other. Though EndlessLegend is set in a colourful world of high fantasy races, Humankind is a more grounded project.

Founder and creative head Romain de Waubert describes Humankind’s aspirational nature. “I was reading history books as a child and imagining huge empires,” he says. “I still want to see Alexander the Great and his conquest of Persian India, or the Mongol empire, the Spanish empire. All these things are incredible and yes, Spain’s still there thank God, but it’s not this huge empire, and they still make us dream, whether they