Recent reviews by Anarch Bushey

They took Darkest Dungeon II into some experimental avenues, and I love this studio for it.
Marvelously rendered 3d cell shaded characters and monsters.
A twisted rendition of HP Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness and Oregon Trail.
An emulsification of the annoying pure RNG of Darkest Dungeon 1 into token based blocking and dodging.
They've shed the traditional RPG mechanics of leveling up and generic gear improvement for something more streamline, and now enemies are more like tests of skill strengths and skill holes.
Kingdoms adds a new mode where you defend your inns from hordes of rampaging monsters and I think that has some potential, it definitely feels like an advanced mod however and the premise needs a bit more polish.
They've taken this to good places and I look forward to seeing even more content down the line, Darkest Dungeon II would never let me get away with base errors and is as cruel as it's ancestor.

No communist memes.

I have to say, I love following the development of games and Humankind was no exception. Following it thus as well as the development of the Civilization franchise has made me come to the conclusion that the 4X community is replete with narcoleptic grognards.

Waxing nostalgic about Civilization and how it is their perfect ideal game they overlook the decades of bad development decisions, buggy launches and multiplayer inaccessibility. Humankind as any other 4X game has also had such a rocky start but gamers in their incessant quest to bring eternal shame upon their fathers feel that they have to make their favorites and preferences their entire personality.

The humankind development team clearly struggled with corporate for years and years and years, DLCs with overpowered Societies and Meme-Cultures being pushed and undesirable features they never wanted being included-- only to be patched out or fixed later when corporate wouldn't notice.

As system requirements have gone up on average so has the amount of features you can fit onto a game state increased and Humankind has not shyed away from being experimental. Pioneering the "evolution of cultures" throughout the ages reflects reality and simultaenously gameify's it into a concept that blends your needs and wishes with the game state with the fiction of the universe you are playing it, marrying it to the reality of dialectical materialism.

Humankind has not evaded the problems all 4X games suffer however. The loading times between turns inevitably become longer and longer as city and population calculations for a planet bear down on your RAM with a hailstorm of data. This is a known problem in Stellaris, Civilization and virtually every other 4X game in my play list. When you have defeated all but the most entrenched opponents, when every tile of the world has been colonized by who remains, all that remains is the inevitable devastation of your computing power.

Thuswhile the complexity of armies, resources and technologies improves into modernity much like our reality the leudonarrative reflects a modernity that breaks your neck with how fast the pace is. By the time one reaches the last era of the game you have an option of diverse Cultures from our relative present to select from, Cuba, the USSR, the USA, Signapore, China, Argentina and many others. The bonuses, are ridiculously powerful but one must consider that only 30 or 40 turns before the game officially ends.

I really appreciate the spread of options one has when pursuing power and city construction in Humankind. Management priorities change, absolutely as you move from era to era as the cultural powers and units you acquire give you an edge over the competition. Recently, the last year they permitted "non-unique cultures" to be selected as you move between ages which prompted gameplay away from the manic race to get to your favorite cultural bonus to promote a more adaptive one which I think fits the leudonarrative of the game ever so snugly. Does it break emmersion on your water world planet that a classical Maori culture was endemic to the planet enabling cultures to colonize hard to reach islands? No. Also shut up.

It is absolutely bizarre to me that the combat in this game is so unliked as it is. The leading 4X game has combat (Tactical Gameplay) that is parallel over the 4X Gameplay (Grand Strategical Gameplay) and the descrepencies between these two concepts have created unusual situations that take me out of the game. Units that take 10,000 years to reach a nearby country. A siege that lasts 500 years. Churning unit after unit out of archers but taking 50 years for industrial cities to create musketmen.

Conversely there is a logic of sort in Humankind that creates fun strategems you can use, as the military units ARE also your builder units and combat takes place over several subturns within your game turns, the theater for the combat also increases as the amount of units in the field increases. In the fiction of the game world, this allows intense situations where one could lose their entire army in a single turn should they botch their defense, or have their reinforcements intercepted before they can join the battle (by entering the boundaries of the theater on the world map). Every military unit takes up 1 population of a city when it is created, creating a need to balance industry or money, food production and scientific advancement.

This game has provided the most useful military units of any 4X game i've ever played. They can chop forest tiles for production, they can raid outposts for money or luxury resources, they can pop trade routes. Military units have niche use cases as well that can benefit the knowledgable player. Weaker units provide an excellent method of channeling a city's overpopulated streets and marching them away from your imperial core into the frontier cities you're struggling to build. Armies can provide a well received stability bonus in addition to bolstering the militia should they be attacked enabling you to build just a little more. Military units can even remodel your cities, demolishing your own districts to rearrange the growing needs of your empire as the eras change and the meta for city building changes from tile exposure, to district clumping, the city specialization and merging and then finally into colony merging.

So here is my unhinged, unmedicated take: It has been almost four years since the release of this beautiful product and almost a full year since they liberated themselves from SEGA. Let them cook. Civ 7 is right around the corner and it is evident that they have taken plenty of inspiration from Humankind. Having four years ahead, it still has six more before it entirely cycles out. 4X games are truly a strange breed of game that cannot fit within the limitations other games have in the industry.

It's on sale all the time, pick up a copy. Follow the development, play some multiplayer and open yourself to a new experience grognard. Who knows, you might like it.