First Impressions: HUMANKIND is a Solid New Historical Strategy that Brings New Features to Stadia
Last week, SEGA and Amplitude Studios released their historical strategy game Humankind. The game released on PC and Stadia and the team at Stadia gave me a copy of the game to enjoy and to try out new Stadia features that the game introduced. Below, you’ll learn about the two new features on Stadia introduced by Humankind and then I’ll provide some first impressions.
First, Humankind is the first game on Stadia to offer direct touch controls! This is a big deal. Up until now, players could have touch controls where a controller-esque UI would overlay itself on your screen to allow you to play, but that’s not very optimal for some games. Direct touch controls does away with the UI and lets you just use 1-3 fingers to interact like most mobile games. A single finger is used to move around the map and make selections while multiple fingers allow you to cancel or toggle the pause menu. I found these controls to work much better for Humankind.
The other new feature is a new spin on Stadia’s State Share feature called Leave Your Mark. With State Share, people can create a save state of a game and then share that with others to try to do certain tasks. This can be used by streamers to challenge audience members to a difficult part of a game or to see who can get the fastest time, etc. Amplitude rolled out Leave Your Mark which is a new take on State Share. In Leave Your Mark, the player will play the same world that you provide them from Turn 1 and they then will compete against your accomplishments and even find ruins and remnants of your civilization. It’s a fun twist.
So, what have I thought about Humankind and these new features? Well, the direct touch controls are much nicer than the virtual controller. I did have problems with it not recognizing when I put three fingers to toggle the menu and when you play on a phone, you can really run into problems with everything being so small due to the size of the screen. I’m sure if I played on a tablet it would’ve been different, but I was playing on a small phone which is fun, but not optimal in the least. As for the Leave Your Mark feature, you tell me how it works. You can use my State Share and play my world and see if you can fare better!
As for the game itself, it’s very familiar as I like to play the Civilization games, but there are enough differences that it doesn’t feel like a copy. Being able to group units together from the start and not having a specific unit for building cities are very nice differences. However, the approach to building and growing cities is probably going to be divisive. I’m not sure if I like it or not myself. You have a unit establish an outpost and then if you have enough favor, you can upgrade it to a city. Then, you can expand the city by attaching additional outposts to it. It’s a unique take for sure.
It’s also interesting how you don’t choose a culture from the start, but rather you choose one as you play and eventually, you can even change your culture. It’s an approach that I think a lot of strategy fans are going to like as you can then adjust as you play based on the game state. You don’t have to be pigeonholed into a strategy from before the start of the game. It’s also a lot of fun to create your own avatar for the game.
My biggest complaint about the game is that it takes a considerable amount of time to load. I’m used to Stadia games being rather fast to load and to have this one take considerably longer is kind of a letdown.
Overall, if you like strategy games, I think it’s worth looking at playing Humankind. There’s still a lot for me to learn about the game (these games are just massive and dense), but I think this is a solid choice.