Recent reviews by Adyen

As you can see, I've played 25 hours of this game and completing it. I would LOVE to give a neutral review, but there are some problems that just puts it slightly less than recommended. The game is generally a management game where you manage resources and people in different locations to do different games. It's a pretty fun management game overall, but these things just makes it impossible to outright recommend:

1) The game has an interesting system built in that will eventually let you put your people on shifts so you don't have to move them around yourself. Now, this is a pretty nice system... except for one thing: Every character in the game is actively represented, thus characters don't teleport from one location to another. And characters has a specific location where they rest, as well as where they work. This means, as a shift switches, the characters going to rest leaves their working location, while the people going to work leaves their rest location... leaving a 5-10 min gap between shifts where nobody is at the location. What?

2) UI is pretty bad. If you have doctors working on people... there's no reason why you can't just see how much longer the doctor is working on the patient from the screen where you're managing patients. You can see it from another page, but the only way to identify the patients is by their names. Not even what work is being done to them.

3) Your characters have traits. Traits that you cannot see anywhere other than a specific employee page. Which means that when you're placing characters to work certain jobs, you need to refer back to that page multiple times and checking the name. And unfortunately, unless you're very far into the late game, it's just better to manually tell your people to rest or work, because they always need less rest than a shift is needed unless you work them to the point of collapse!

There's a few other UI issues that just makes this game irritating to play. Is it completely bad? No, it's an average game. I recommend it if it's on a heavy sale, but just note that there's some very questionable UI and design issues in this game. (For example: There's a research that makes it so that it's easier to heal a specific type of patient. Issue is, it either takes longer to cure them, or more resources to cure them - both of which you almost never want, especially since longer cure times means it's easier for other patients to get worse, while more resources means you're stretched more in the method of how you can get the resources to heal everyone!)

For what it's worth, it's a pretty interesting game that gives you exactly what you'd expect. It has a bit of replayability by allowing you to choose which chapter to replay, which saves on time. Would recommend if you like this genre of game, but maybe at a price a bit less than the current listed price.

Stray is a cute game with a rather interesting premise. It's really best played to enjoy, as the experience I've had playing this game has put it very much near game of the year for me.

The only "negative" thing about this game could be it's length, but for an indy developer for $30ish, it's totally worth the price and experience.

This is really what Langrisser should have evolved to! The idea of letting players develop their own armies is such a simple idea, but so few games actually allow you to do so in a strategy game.

While this game has a few polish and UI problems, the developers are working on them and their discord has a lot of people reporting bugs or things to improve upon.

There is literally nothing special in getting the season pass now that both DLC 1 and 2 are out, as they cost the same and none of the resources or parts you get from buying the season pass is really worth it. Get this if you're getting both DLC 1 and 2, but honestly you might want to consider skipping or only getting one DLC if you're just a casual player.

I'm this close to giving this game a negative vote because there's no achievement for becoming a cat.

Do not purchase. Game is already discontinued on the server side but Steam still has it up for some reason.

This review was written on Aug 21 2021, a few days after the release.

As of right now, the game includes multiple bugs, including game breaking and soft-locks that were found during the closed Beta (you can see them from the bug archives on their site) but were not fixed. So no matter how unique or interesting the game is, I cannot recommend buying it at this time.

Humankind goes out of its way to be different from Civ and succeeds by using some rather unique mechanics. But... it feels incomplete and give me a rather hurried feeling like a game released before it was completely ready. Considering the studio, I expect to see multiple DLCs come out within a year with content that would "complete" the game.

Things unique to this game: You're on a timer while playing a 4X. Everything you do should be aimed towards getting the only thing that matters in winning: Fame points. Changing who you play as per era is unique as well, but it makes it so that you don't really feel like you have an identity. Narrative stories are cool... But nobody will really choose choices based on the narrative (outside of specific playthroughs).

War... I honestly am impressed by the war system. It punishes you for playing defensively as it both wastes time/turns to get more fame, and your war support if you declared an offensive war. Even in a defensive one, the longer you waste time on the war without any gains, there's still a chance where your war support tanks because you're not trying to end the war. But the way it calculates war-score is a bit weird - If you win a war, you can't take cities that you're not controlling. But the AI does not seem to be under this constraint! While it would make sense for the AI to declare a war over a city/outpost and get it if they win the war, there has been constant people posting that they could take much more based on war score alone.

The in-game encyclopedia is completely useless as it does not explain any of the minor mechanics in the game. It only has a description of the each era's civ and stuff that's explained in the tutorial. Chances are, if you are looking through it for some mechanic that just happened or is happening, you won't actually find what you're looking for.

Oh yes, and balance. This game's balance is a bit to the weird side because some abilities combo much, much, much, much stronger than everything else. Some civs are also stronger than others in each era (and this is even considering that they have specific specialities they're supposed to be good at).

Either way, until many of the problems described above is fixed or changed, I can't recommend the game as it is. Maybe give it a few more months to smooth over the problems. I'll come back to this review if and when they fix the major problems with the game.

This game has some real hard choices to make. Sometimes, they don't end up meaning anything. Other times, it makes a world of difference. All you can really hope for is to make the right decision for the current time.

The game as it is has a bit of AI choice problems, but overall the game works. What the game really needs is a way to have one of your survivors do a specific job you choose over whatever the AI decides is important. But overall quite a fun game and enjoyable to play.