The first time I played a 4X game was at a cousin’s house. They had Civilization 2 on their family computer, and after a couple turns I was completely enamored with it. When I got home, I had to get it for myself and put in hours and hours of playtime. As time went on, I played Alpha Centauri, then Civilization 3, 5, and 6. Across the games, I’ve probably sunk close to 1,000 hours into the turn-based strategy series.
Over the years, I’ve tried a number of other 4X games and nothing really captured me like Civilization. I found Crusader Kings and Stellaris interesting, but the level of depth and complication was more than I usually wanted from my 4X sessions. Total War: Shogun captured me for a while, but didn’t pull me into the Total War series the way I had been pulled into Civilization. Humankind is the first time I’ve honestly been able to say a game does everything I want a 4X to do, and it does it better than Civilization in every instance I’ve encountered.
Humankind starts you off in the Neolithic period. Unlike Civilization, where you feel rushed to start your first city as fast as possible, Humankind encourages you to move around and take in your surroundings a bit. You start with a single unit and, by encountering special food tiles or hunting deer and mammoths, can create new units from your existing one. This lets you explore further and wider before settling down. It’s completely feasible to make it all the way to the ancient era before you even put down an Outpost, the precursor settlement that can eventually become a city.
Screenshot from Humankind shows a tribe unit on a cliff, overlooking a forest and the ocean, with mammoths, deer, and bears roaming the map. Source: Amplitude
Like other 4X games, choosing where you’re going to start is a matter of finding a good balance of food and industry resources. One nice change from Civilization is the use of terrain - where Civilization does have some defensive bonuses from things like hills and forests, Humankind has several different heights of terrain, which create really interesting and dynamic battles.
The battles are a place where the Humankind approach really shines. When you start a battle against another unit (or set of units), you have two options, a manual battle or an automatic resolution. If you choose to go with the manual battle, you enter a little mini tactical battle round. You can deploy your units across the terrain, taking advantage of high ground and mobility bonuses to make battles where you’re theoretically weaker into more even affairs. Unlike in Civilization, where you may take several full game terms to resolve a battle between several units, Humankind let’s you finish many fights within a single turn of the game by breaking the battle out into this tactical system.
One of my favorite systems in Humankind is the ideology system. Throughout the game you’re presented with random events asking you to make choices for your people. The way you answer these questions moves your civilization left or right on four different ideological spectrums - collectivism versus individualism, liberty versus authority, tradition versus progress, and world versus homeland. Rather than preset archetypes like Civilization uses, this system creates a more organic way for AI civilizations, or other players if you’re playing online, to build relationships with you. If you’re more authoritarian, liberty-focused empires will like you less; if you’re more collectivist, individualist empires will be more antagonistic. The more extreme the ideological differences, the more likely you are to be in conflict with the other empires.
The key system that really sets Humankind apart is the culture system. Rather than selecting a leader and being locked into their bonuses and weaknesses for the rest of the game, each time you change eras (from neolithic to ancient to classical and so on), you are given the opportunity to change cultures. Maybe you started with a money focused culture like the Egyptians but have found yourself in conflict with one of your neighbors. When you move up to the classical period you may choose to switch to a more combat focused culture like the Huns. This really helps the game feel more fluid, and resolves the problem of needing to pick a single way to play on turn one and grind that style out for several hundred turns, regardless of how circumstances change over the game.
Screenshot from the game Humankind, it shows a carousel interface with Teutons, Khmer, English, Mongols, and Umayyads cultures. Source: Amplitude
There are so many places like this where Humankind takes an idea or system from Civilization and fleshes it out or makes it feel better. The game is full of small quality of life improvements (like the battle system) that you feel every single turn. More than 20 hours in and I’m constantly marvelling at how the game continues to flow along without the sort of slumps and slogs of mid- and late-game Civilization. While it’s not breaking any extraordinary new ground for the genre, it is so well refined that it feels almost revelatory in comparison to other 4X games.
As a final thought on Humankind, I would like to note that the game does not seem to grapple significantly with the problems intrinsic to the genre. 4X (which stands for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) is founded in power fantasies of settler-colonialism. While Humankind does eliminate the barbarians of Civilization in favor of peaceful and aggressive animals, and later independent nations you can build actual relationships with, the game is still focused on the expansion of empires, and, as such, conquering, assimilating, or exterminating at least some of your neighbors is a likely consequence. In my experience so far, it is easier to avoid war with your neighbors than in games like Civilization or Crusader Kings, but not to the degree where I can say it is discouraged or unrewarded. I would love to see a large-scale strategy game grapple with this part of the genre, but Humankind is not that game.
Humankind was released in August 2021 by Amplitude and Sega, and you can find it on Xbox Games Pass, Steam, Epic, and Stadia.