PC Gamer and IGN reviews don't seem too good..

[Kyllin]

Don't shoot the messenger, LOL.

[The Doctor]

Let's take some time to review the IGN review and see what people have got themselves so worked up about, shall we?

https://sea.ign.com/humankind/175480/review/humankind-review

I don't want to spend an entire review comparing Humankind to Sid Meier's Civilization, but it's very clear that this is Amplitude's riff on that classic 4X melody. While I was delighted by some genuine improvements and innovations on my turn-based march from the Stone Age to the Space Age, most of the basics felt pretty familiar. And more than once, that left me wishing it had pushed the boundaries a bit more, like the studio's previous Endless Space and Endless Legend games did.

One of my favorite little new ideas in Humankind is the Neolithic Era, which starts each run with a small band of nomadic hunter-gatherers who have to collect enough food or science to advance and become a settled society. I enjoyed this unorthodox playstyle so much that I wished I could have spent more time with it, or even remained nomadic. But you eventually settle into a more traditional 4X routine of expanding cities through districts to collect food, science, production, and cash, against up to nine other AI or human-controlled empires...

This is a good start. Nothing controversial here as far as I can see. She clearly likes the Neolithic gameplay and appreciates its innovation. So far so good...

There are two new resources that mix things up a little. Influence limits how much you can expand externally and spreads your culture to neighboring cities, while stability limits how much you can expand internally, as urban centers that sprawl out further and further become more difficult to govern. These considerations made planning out my empire's path to prosperity an interesting and often challenging puzzle. As a chill tile-painting game in which I can watch my civilization spread across the gorgeous world map, Humankind stands up well against its competition.

Influence is also used quite a bit in the diplomacy system, and this is probably the cleverest idea Humankind brings to the genre. You can just declare war out of nowhere, but doing so gives a large bonus to your enemy's war support, which is a measure of how enthusiastic their people are to fight you. If you instead spread your religion or culture to one of their cities, you can gain a grievance against them for "oppressing" your people, which will slowly tick up your side's war support over time. So to truly be a successful conqueror, you need to be exporting your gods and your top radio hits, not just have the biggest army...

Again, she seems to know what she's talking about here and is familiar with the game systems. I can see how the 'chill tile-painting' game comment is going to get some folks' hackles up. Map painter? Oh no!

Her appreciation of the war support mechanic seems informed as well.

As neat as this system is, it didn't put a lot of pressure on me unless I went looking for a fight. Even on the higher difficulties, I never had a war declared on me even once over the course of three campaigns. That included when I had a very small army that couldn't have stood up to my neighbors if they’d come knocking. And the Independent People who sometimes gave me trouble were all too easy to pacify with money or influence compared to Civ's sometimes nasty barbarians. It's altogether too trivial to keep everyone happy by making trade agreements, paying bribes, and forgiving your grievances against them.

And while Humankind's battle system has a nice pacing to it, since multiple battle turns can take place within a single world turn, the AI is consistently disappointing. They'll often spread their attacks out over multiple units and then get obliterated when they could have focus-fired and at least cost me a unit on the way out. Not that Civ’s AI is exactly legendary, but the recent Old World showed us that this can be done a lot better. The wars I fought were full of interesting tactical considerations thanks to how much things like terrain and line of sight factor into each engagement, but the fact that I rarely felt like defeat was a possibility made my victories feel rote rather than triumphant.

And now we get to the meat of it. She played the game on higher difficulties, ("so she said!" as some will sneer) and she deliberately kept a small army and was not attacked. That doesn't sound good and I'm sure there are a lot of folks who really don't want to hear that.

The AI is disappointing. Some folks are just desperate to be told that Humankind's AI is good, certainly better than Civ 6's. She must be lying. She also compared it to Old World's AI and she thinks it was done better in OW. Oh dear. I can see what they're getting angry about now.

And while the zoomed-in 3D map looks fantastic, Amplitude has tried to go the route of replacing map overlays with a system that gives you different information the further you scroll out. The problem is that both of the higher-level ones look atrocious and you can't turn them off. The mid-level zoom view is a soul-crushing gray void that doesn't give me any useful info I couldn't get on the 3D map, and I'd enjoy Humankind more if they just removed it entirely. And the top-level view, which is at least useful for seeing political boundaries, looks like disorienting neon vomit and gives me a headache. I hate looking at them, and I hate that they hide the rather attractive and realistic terrain and cities. I would compare it directly to Crusader Kings 3, which uses a very similar system, but each of its zoom levels has a clear job and looks great doing it.

She likes the zoomed-in map and thinks the mid level and zoomed out views are bad. That's her opinion and I don't share it but it's her review and its her opinion.

The other headline feature is that you'll be choosing a different culture for every era, rather than one that sticks with you through the ages. I really liked this on a mechanical level. For one thing, it means you have a unique unit every era, instead of only for a small part of each campaign. The design of these units and bonuses felt very safe, though. There's nothing as wild or game-changing as some of the more out there civ and leader abilities in Civ 5 and 6, and they typically just provide new ways to generate resources. However, since cultures all have niches like Expansionist or Scientist, you can focus on a different playstyle every era, which is nice in a long campaign where you might get bored of being type-cast as a warlord or a brainiac. And that won't hamstring you, since victory is based on a Fame system that adds up all of your deeds, from conquest to building the biggest cities.

Her assessmsent of the culture changing mechanics is controversial. Whether you agree with her opinion or not, she knows what she's talking about.

There is a religion system, but only just. Like the era bonuses for each culture, the bonuses you can add to your faith are mostly simple modifiers to resource generation or modest military buffs. Religion only spreads passively, and unless I was looking for a reason to go to war, I usually forgot it existed. There is a kind of interesting late-game wrinkle in that you can pursue tolerant secularism or militant state atheism, modeling changing ideas about the nature of the universe. The problem is, while this is cool for roleplaying and can generate new conflicts in the case of atheism, it felt like taking away some of my toys since neither of these belief systems get anything to replace holy sites or tenet bonuses.

The culture system also doesn't exactly solve the roleplaying problem of telling a coherent, historical story like I’d hoped it might. Sure, we could say my Khmer realm was conquered by the Ming Empire when I chose them as my next culture, but where did these Chinese bureaucrats come from? Were they hiding in the forest? Outer space? They weren't on the map anywhere before I decided to play as them. This is of course, no siller than Civ's version of this same problem where you have American tribesmen founding the city of Washington D.C. in 4,000 BCE. But it's not necessarily a lot more logical, either.

Yes, other reviewers as well as open beta players have remarked that the Religion system is shallow.

TBC

[universecreep]

Escrito originalmente por The Doctor:

I know. I just find it ironic that the two IGN reviews I've read, Stellaris and Humankind, have both been greeted by the fanbase with such hostility because they didn't say enough nice things about the game and dare to say that it's not that great.

I think what most people find a little hard to take is the double standard that seems to exist.

Take a look at Beyond Earth. Not a great CIv game by any stretch. Somehow it got a 7.9 from IGN and PC gamer gave it an 87 - an 87. Civ 5 got a 93 from them. You mean to tell me Beyond Earth is only 6 points less than CIv 5? It seems that anything with Meiers' name on it seems to get a bit of a pass on the critical reviews by some sites that isn't extended to others in the genre. The same thing with Civ 6 vanilla. It didn't deserve the 93 PC Gamer or the 94 IGN gave it. Again, likely getting extra points because of the name.

Did Stellaris deserve 90+ on release? I'd say no but it was better than the 63 IGN or the 70 PC Gamer gave it. It certainly is in probably a high 80 - low 90 now with the DLCs.

I think the same can be said of Humankind. Is it in CIv 5 or 6 territory? Probably not. I'd say it's a solid 8-8.5 judging from the Beta and the game plays I've watched.

I don't care if they give the game a low mark. If it deserves it fine. In this case, I do feel that because it doesn't say Sid Meier's Humankind, it loses marks unfairly.

[The Doctor]

I was also fairly disappointed with the late game. There is an event chain related to climate change, but in my games it only cost what was at that point less than one turn's worth of income to avoid any consequences at all. And even ignoring it completely only gives you a -30 to all resource production in your cities for 10 turns, which isn’t much by the time it comes up. The map doesn't even change to reflect rising sea levels or growing deserts. Similarly, there is a Pollution mechanic that kicks in once coal becomes available, but hell if I know what it does. The tooltip doesn't explain it. There's no encyclopedia entry about it. And even when I was trying to produce as much of it as possible in my Soviet run to find out, it never got above "Level 0" or had any effect on anything. Downplaying the climate crisis in any game about humanity's near future is not only factually incorrect – it's also really boring game design, giving up on the chance to mix things up and introduce new challenges at a point when you're probably just taking victory laps.

Climate change is not particularly well thought out or clear and the consequences are easily and painlessly avoidable? That's fair enough. Again, she seems to have spent some time playing the game and played as the Soviets and deliberatedly tested the mechaincs to see how they worked. That's not lazy reviewing IMO.

That being said, these narrative events are a nice touch throughout the other ages. They might ask you whether you allow priests of both genders or only one, or if your monarchy should be absolute or constitutional. These decisions will move you along ideological axes like Liberty vs Authority and Tradition vs Progress. Just like the cultures, though, the bonuses for doing so seem like very small tweaks to resource generation most of the time. I didn't get the sense that being Collectivist vs Individualist greatly transformed my society or allowed me to roleplay in any very meaningful ways. And while your ideological distance from another empire is supposed to generate diplomatic tension, the sheepishness of the AI to declare war meant this never really affected me much at all.

I also can't go without mentioning some bugs and performance issues. Especially if I tabbed out of the game and back in, I would often have issues like the wagons and semi trucks travelling along my roads starting to flicker in and out of existence until I did a clean restart of the program. More rarely, audio would start to skip and become garbled. And worst of all, in one of my campaigns, I hit a point where ending the turn would simply hang forever and not allow me to continue. Amplitude is apparently aware of this last issue and told me they plan to fix it in the day one patch, but the workaround they provided me didn't prove useful and I had to abandon that run.

Displaying an understanding of the societal sliders and their impact on the game. Bugs and performance issues. Check! Nobody can say that they were avoided in this particular review. Those encountered were reported. How dare she! . Bad reviewer!

I don't dislike Humankind – far from it. But as the sun sets on my attractive empire, I'm not that impressed with it either. It certainly has some strong ideas, and the diplomacy system, at least in theory, is excellent. I loved the flexibility of being able to specialize in something different with each new culture I adopted. But especially against the passive and tactically inept AI, I kept feeling like I'd rather be playing Civ 4, or Civ 5, or Civ 6. To be fair, if this were a Civilization game, that would almost be expected – they've each come out in a state that was a bit underwhelming compared to where their predecessors ended up after multiple expansions. And maybe with time and DLC, Humankind will stand alongside the best of them as well. For now, it's an intriguing, though not always excelling, offshoot of a time-tested formula that succeeds at making me want to keep clicking one more turn…

And so her verdict. It's HER opinion of the game and whether you like it or not, she seems to have done the work and knows what she's wrtiting about. I don't see that as being a bad review at all.

Passive and inept AI - reported.
Bugs and hangs - reported.
DLC might make it the best - stated.

What got folks so riled? I've seen worse Steam reviews with a Thumbs Up and a host of awards attached.

[ShadowDark3]

I liked just about everything I read in the PC Gamer review (aside from the presence of a few bugs). It seemed like the reviewer's main issues were that Humankind doesn't have some of the things the studio's other 4X games have, and that it isn't "weird" enough. I really didn't enjoy Endless Legend or Endless Space, so I suspect those negatives will end up being positives for me.

I think what many people forget about reviews are that the number only matters if you agree with all the reviewer's opinions, which is seldom the case.

[Ravenblade]

I wouldn't read much into these scores. For once, they are subjective to the tester and not based on some standardized criteria. Yes, they have their own criteria, but it's different depending on the persons' involvement with the genre. For instance, PC Gamer gave Endless Space 2 a 77, and it was actually received lukewarm by a lot of people at first. Suffice to say that Humankind actually has to compete with a giant, and developers never denied otherwise. So the boots to fill are a lot bigger here and there can be made a case for being more critical than usual, which is good. The more the score reflects the players' tenor, the better. To be honest after reading both of them it seems they gave fair criticism which kind of reflect issues not wholly own to this game, but other Amplitude games and in terms of AI they share that with a lot of other games in the genre. The initial Civ 5 and Civ 6 AI were widely panned at first. The state of AIs of a lot of strategy games are fairly bad at launch and most only get improved over time, especially when players found ways to exploit weaknesses. In the end a good game is still good, if you expect a world-killing blockbuster then you will be disappointed. Most 4X games actually only receive fair judgement after a long period of time has passed.

[VoiD]

I'd trust user reviews, wait till release, these "professionals" are often paid to spam propaganda, not because they understand anything about games.

Yeah you may find dozens of stupid user reviews, but when you look at the bigger picture, of thousands of opinions the average tends to be way more legit.

That or just watch the gameplay yourself, instead of what someone is saying about the gameplay, there are already videos out on YT showing the game.

[DNLH]

The Doctor came here with his TARDIS, Voyager and reason like anyone would listen :D

I see you, Doctor. Half of the time I don't understand why you still try, but I'm moved by your effort.

[Digihuman]

IGN is the company that once rated a game lower than normal because it had "too much water". PC gamer isn't much better. Frankly, non-high scores only tells you that the reviewers weren't paid off these days.

User reviews are where it's at.

[The Doctor]

Escrito originalmente por VoiD:

I'd trust user reviews, wait till release, these "professionals" are often paid to spam propaganda, not because they understand anything about games.

Yeah you may find dozens of stupid user reviews, but when you look at the bigger picture, of thousands of opinions the average tends to be way more legit.

That or just watch the gameplay yourself, instead of what someone is saying about the gameplay, there are already videos out on YT showing the game.

The whole point of that wall of text above was to show that the IGN reviewer actually understands the game and knows what she's talking about more or less. And yet her review is trashed or dismissed because it is a "paid-for, shill review". If you wish to say it's propaganda, please read it and highlight the parts you consider it to be. I don't see any. I don't agree with all of it but i wouldn't dismiss her observations as propaganda because I don't agree. Too extreme for me, sorry.

I'm not an IGN fan or think her review is all anyone needs to know to inform their decision to buy or not. But as far as reviews go, I'm not sure what more you could expect from a game review site if they were honest and not on the take. It's far from muddying the waters or hiding anything from us.

And I know some poster active here who will defame you for claiming that thousands of opinions carry more weight. ;) Apparently Justiin Beiber is very popular, so I've been told, so their argument goes that "if you think Steam reviews are reliable in that regard, you must think Justin Beiber's music is the best ever too." Yes, I feel the same way about that particular line of "argumentation" too.

[The Doctor]

Escrito originalmente por DNLH:

The Doctor came here with his TARDIS, Voyager and reason like anyone would listen :D

I see you, Doctor. I don't understand why you still try half of the time, but I'm moved by your effort.

Because I have nothing better to do today :D

Sad. But I'll be fine again tomorrow.

[CapitalTeeth]

7/10 is still good, wtf are you talking about?

[Wichura]

how much do we want to be ensured that this is a good game , "for sure not 7/10 but better?" Apart to what reviewers says, how would you review your hype, hope and love to strategic games like civilization?

[Stannis]

Reminder IGN gave a 5.9 to Alien Isolation which is one of the greatest horror game of the decade
I don't trust their reviews

[The Doctor]

Perhaps each review needs to be judged on its own merit then? I don't trust IGN and I don't use them to inform my Steam purchases but since it has been a little controversial, I decided to have a read and found it to be a fair and reasonably informed review. There's no need for anyone to get hot under the collar about it as far as I can see as it's fair and addresses the concerns I've seen from folks about the game here these last few weeks.

But that doesn't mean I'll be reading more IGN reviews in the future. ;)

[DMK]

I didn't knew that IGN and PC Gamer are still into gaming. I was thinking that those muppets were lost for long into woke diversity & inclusion politics.