Humankind
Refreshes the 4X genre.
Humankind strips away the victory conditions of other 4X games and replaces them with a single metric: fame. While this isn’t wholly unique
– it functions on a similar level to Civilization’s score victories – it brings the ‘backup victory’ front and center. No longer totting up the interesting things you did as a sort of tie-breaker, the interesting things you do are the point. Charting a new continent? Fame. First to discover writing? Fame. Absolute best at farming? Fame.
You start the game off in the
Neolithic era, without any kind of culture yet. Your culture defines who you are in any given era – from Ancient Egyptian builders to British expansionists – but that can’t develop in a vacuum, so your first job is to get the lay of the land. As you explore, hunt, and fight other settlers, you accumulate the influence needed to settle your first outposts, which will eventually become your sprawling cities. Hitting certain milestones garners you era stars (which in turn earn fame), and it only takes one before you can pick your first culture and move on to the Ancient Era – or lurk in the Neolithic Era to keep picking up stars, and fame.
Each culture has a key strength. So for the Ancient Olmecs, who I first played as, their strength was aesthete
– with an emphasis on diplomacy and influence. That strength came with a skill I could use to bring a territory of mine back under my sphere of influence by pushing works of art, potentially flipping nearby territories too. It felt so sneaky the first time I realised what had happened, but when you get another empire’s territory fully under your sphere of influence, it pings a grievance on your behalf, so you can say: “hey, I think those look like my people, not yours – guess we should we renegotiate those borders, huh?”
Embracing player motivations from start to finish, Humankind refreshes the 4X genre – even with a couple of technical kinks.
Ruth Cassidy