The nature of 4X strategy games can often make them unwieldy and hard to understand for players who aren't immersed in the genre. Part of that is the scope--in most 4X games (the genre name standing for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), you're growing and managing a whole civilization, often throughout its entire history. That's your mandate in Amplitude Studios' upcoming title Humankind, too, but one of the more remarkable things about the game is how it guides you through the process of creating a civilization that'll make its mark on history.
Humankind will remind players of other similar titles, most notably the Civilization series, in that you play humans rising from early nomadic societies to explorers of outer space. You'll do all the usual 4X stuff--raise cities, gather resources, research new technologies, and build armies to either protect yourself from other civilizations or conquer them. But unlike other 4X games, Humankind includes a system that provides you with constant, short-term goals that keep you on track at any given moment, while also helping you get a big picture idea of how you want to build your society.
We recently got a chance to play about four hours of Humankind, starting in one of its earliest eras of history. It gave us a sense of the game's city building, resource management, and combat, although a lot of systems--diplomacy, religion, trade--aren't in the game yet. As any 4X game, it maintains the complexity that fans of the genre expect when it comes to planning and developing their civilizations, but Humankind also feels more approachable than most, thanks to a specific system called "Fame."
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