The fifteenth door on the Advent Calendar is a bit confusing, almost as if six different artists came together to create it at different times. Interesting. Let’s see what lies on the other side of it.
It is a mixed civilization of Human!
Nate Crowley: The thing about a good 4X game (such as Man of Amplitude!) is that – at least in theory – you can play it forever. 4X is a kind of complicated snowball where you give a series of abstract simulations of historical leaders, or alien warlords, or whatever, before shaking it thoroughly and… it on your desk while bellowing Oppenheimer quotes? Yeah, sorry; do not think metaphor passed very well.
However, you get the idea. With randomly generated worlds and opponents creating a slightly different challenge each time you play, it doesn’t really make a difference once you’ve seen all the must-sees in 4X, because the fun lasting pleasure is to be found in the combination of said things. Case in point: Civilization 5, which I played regularly for ten years after its 2010 release, despite being someone who doesn’t feel comfortable repeating, just because the basic feeling of “playing Civilization 5” doesn’t never really lost its luster.
I stopped playing Civ 5 last though. And the reason (hopefully to assuage the discomfort of anyone reading from Amplitude, after I’ve spent the first three paragraphs of this post writing about Civ) is Humanity.
Like I said, 4X games are all about replayability; about how long they can keep you from realizing that you’re spending too much time doing the same thing over and over. And the key to this is the number of variables open to recombination in the next 4X games in question.
Well, as you may already know about the Humans, it makes a big splash in this department, by giving the player a choice of ten civilizations to play with… six times over the course of a game. In theory, that’s a million neat potential combinations. And most of the time, in fact. As I continued to play, I kept running into situations where I had previously looked down on villagers whom I had treated as idiots dozens of times, which suddenly turned into circumstantial clutch picks. , leaving me with a whole new set of toys to play with.
I mean, the mix and match is clearly a torpedo of an idea when it comes to realism. It would be strange how an entire civilization of proud and fearsome Greeks suddenly decided “we are Dutch now”, and massively entered the stock market, wouldn’t it? But let’s face the facts here: none of us have ever played a 4X game to enjoy the re-enactment of history (unless history involves countless battles I never knew existed, there are endlessly dense mounds of cavemen destroying tank battalions a la Civ 1).
I really find Humanity’s civilized identity crises endearing.
I really find Humanity’s civilized identity crises endearing. They put the old-fashioned absurdity of historic 4X games front and center, making the whole thing a little more drab and making it easy to stop worrying about ultimate efficiency and just roll. with punches. That’s one of the reasons why I find Humanity a bit slower than other 4X games, although I would say that given the lead it’s still a huge chunk of time away.
Whether it will be another sinking likely to drain my vital force over the course of a decade, remains to be seen. Now, I find it has become a game I want to play for sure every month or so, instead of a default option that constantly gnaws beneath my executive function. But honestly, that works for me. Like my mate, Ghoastus always said, Rome isn’t built every day.
Ollie: My favorite thing about every Amplitude game I’ve played is the music. I regularly listen to the Endless Legend soundtrack while working and it has become one of my favorite gaming spots for a long time. But it’s just what’s so special about the sheer grandeur and scope of the Humankind soundtrack that allows it to completely usurp the Endless Legends soundtrack as my accompaniment.
On Humankind’s release day, the developers released five soundtrack videos on YouTube. One is what you might call the “main” soundtrack, filled with familiar music playing across all games and worlds. It’s absolutely amazing, as you’d expect.
The remaining four videos are each a 2-hour compilation of all the tracks written specifically for each of the 60 cultures in the game. That makes eight hours (eight hours!) of wonderfully diverse, authentic music, the well-meaning efforts of countless fascinating musicians, professionals and instruments from around the world. . All aside from the main soundtrack, they all have the same calm, soothing mood that made composer Arnaud Roy’s previous score so great. At some point in the future, I may eventually stop playing Humankind, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop listening to music.
