izigame.me

I really, *really* wanted to like Humankind, specifically because it promised to be a breath of fresh air in the ever-dulling scene of 4X-Civ games.
It started out with a pretty ambitious vision by the makers of the whole Endless franchise. Lots of dev diaries, detailed vision concepts... and, of course, the first 'open dev' program that has nowadays been adapted by quite a few other game titles during their developement.
The game did (and does) a lot of things right when it comes to fixing the classic pitfalls of civilization games: You do not play as one particular nation that assuredly didn't even exist for the full 10k of human history, but an amalgam of indiivdual cultures that move through the ages. You do not get one unit and a building for one specific age, and then end up being the exact same civ as anybody else for any timeframe outside of that age, but you pick a specialization and a playstyle focus per age, being able to shift and adapt to whatever your current situation requires. You do not just race down one tech/civic/military tree to reach one of multiple goals the fastest, but you strive to maximize score gain by fulfilling smaller scale goals that may even require you to pace your technological progress.
Buuuut, the game also runs into the same pitfalls as other civ-like titles: The game is very overtly built around the early game (which is obviously played and tested the most), but then someone loses track towards modern times, with tanks just being stronger cavalry units, airforce being an afterthought, nuclear deterrent and modern political problems being nonexistant.
The AI, as usual, can't remotely keep up with the player, and has to use massive cheats to not become immedeately redundant past turn 50. And even then barely evolves beyond being a sitting target.
The game's performance stutters and struggles as cities grow more and more, and all the numbers inflate to usually nonsensical levels of production, science or gold. And, in the end, it doesn't matter how you got there, or what you actually are, because the end-game tends to look the same anyways.
The game would still be a valid alternative to Civilization 5. BUT
I have to subtract a significant chunk of review point for the game's trajectory: Humankind started a buggy, half-finished mess in open dev. That's fine, early access / beta and all that. Upon release it was barebones, but playable. Then the next patch added religion, fleshed out civics, and added QoL. All good.
It's the most recent expansion when things, for me, started to turn sour: I was part of the open dev for the expansion, and the insights were... sobering. The expansion's theme was Diplomacy which, okay, wasn't going to fix anything about the lategame, and added the obligatory espionage system in the obligatory undercooked fashion... but it also made so many dumb mistakes, like adding mid-game 'exploration' menial tasks in regards to players micromanaging 'diplomatic scouts' to pick up 'diplomatic goodie huts'. For some reason it took *weeks* to even get a basic auto-'diplomatic explore' button after countless testers complained how the new system was a lot of manual pathing for nothing... but then that auto-explore was utterly incompetent, would run your non-combat diplomats units into foreign territory or just break when a diplomatic goodie was inaccessible.
The usage of the new diplomatic currency was clunky and often not even worth it. There was this grand idea of paying another civ with an expensive treaty in order to be able to build their emblematic units, in exchange for giving them a token payment that wouldn't scale with age and thus be absurdly irrelevant in anything but early eras.
There was one particular instant of a culture from the expansion having an emblematic unit with a special effect that was both abyssimal and counter-intuitive to that cultures 'diplomatic' approach. So when petitioned to change it, with countless alternative suggestions for the units special ability by the testers... the response of the devs was to just double the obscure useless bonus to 'fix' the problem.
Needless to say, overall the expansion was so much of a letdown, even in the final stages of open dev, I simply did not buy it upon it's release alltogether.
Now, after a couple more months and minor updates, I revisited the game and
it's straight up *worse* off than before the expansion: The AI on higher difficulties now 'deliberately avoids entering new eras in order to maximize score and competitively challenge the player'. Which sounds good in theory, but in practice means the AI will intentionally handycap it's technological progression, meaning now the players will be Age*S* more advanced even without ever picking up a scientific civ. And in the end, going for an extra star or two doesn't justify being overrun by your neighbour who's units completely outclass yours.
Then there's the new (non-expansion, thus 'free') cultures that add even more quadratically scaling modifiers that break the game's balance in hilarious (but not exactly balance-furthering) ways. All it took was one culture to swap me from the least populated to the most populated civilization in less than 10 turns. There's such a thing as overkill.
Additionally, I've noticed that a lot of menus and features have been reworked, not necessarily to the better: You no longer can see on a glance how your research is going, because for some reason, despite plenty-voiced concerns about it in the opendev, the research menu was moved from a helpfully informative circle in the bottom, to a small feature-less button at the top. And features like managing wonder production allocation by clicking the wonder and assigning cities with a few clicks was removed in favor of having yet another city production overview, which's tooltip claims you can assign them to the wonder here.. but doesn't actually provide that option (not sure whether this is just another instance of horrible UX design, a feature now locked behind the expansion, or an oversight).
So, by all perspectives I can apply, the game has legitimately become worse.
And I don't quite see that trend reversing, since a lot of focus seem to have been thrown at providing 'community challenges' and 'exciting scenarios', instead of actually fixing the problems of the actual game.
Overall, I'll give Humankind a 5/10, and place it into the "Interesting concept, mediocre execution, and woeful post-release developement" box.