YMMV / Humankind

• Annoying Video Game Helper: The snarky narrator gets tiresome within minutes of gameplay, with his lemony tangents outstaying their welcome soon after. Fortunately, he can be muted.
• Anvilicious: Of the Green and Broken Aesop variety. Pollution is bad. Very, very bad. And you can't really fight it. You can reduce it and you can slow it, but its always there and it only starts to accumulate with industrialisation. The only real way to avoid pollution is to never build industrial-era structures. Which leads to the broken part of it - you might have massive sweatshops covering half of the continent and that's fine, but should you introduce mechanisation, it suddenly turns into polluted wasteland and kills humanity. All of this might be result of bugs, however, as the pollution system is exceedingly finicky.
• Awesome Art: The map might be a bit bland bunch of pastel tones, but the artworks for all the structures, cultures and units are absolutely gorgeous. Further made awesome by sticking to the colour scheme of the related resources.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Picking specific cultures due to their immensely powerful bonuses and/or general specialities. A particularly strong and recurring combo is the Babylonian-Greek duo early on, for maximum technological edge.
  • Good luck finding a player that doesn't have Joseon as their first, second, and third picks for the Early Modern era. Part of it comes from how strong the bonuses of Joseon are, part from how abysmal the alternatives are.
  • Picking any culture that offers either a percentage increase in output of something or, even better, a percentage discount, be it production or science. The bonus completely overwhelms any other alternatives, especially if more than one culture is in the same speciality.
• Crack Pairing: The black scientist and viking woman holding hands on the cover art are sometimes interpreted as a couple.
• Dancing Bear: The game is pretty dull and uninspired Civ clone, but its "hunter-gatherer phase", where rather than having a settlement, you have a unit representing a tribe that has to hunt and scavenge for resources first to gain critical size, is easily the most talked-about mechanic.
• Funny Moments:
  • The Launch Trailer starts off like the 1969 moon landing, even playing the "That's one small step for man" clip... only to find that someone else is already on the moon... and they're carrying a Brazilian flag. The two astronauts tussle while The Blue Danube plays, with the Brazilian gaining the upper hand. Just as the Brazilian is about to "plant his flag" on the American... he sees something in the visor and there's a horde of EVERY OTHER COUNTRY! The two astronauts pick up their flags and charge against the horde.
• Game-Breaker:
  • As always with 4X games, research. Cultures that specialise in it gain obscene edge, especially if research specialty is maintained for few eras in a row. A combination of Babylonian, Greek, Frankish and Korean special buildings (respectively: ancient, classic, medieval and early modern) allows to just swim in science, speedballing research for the rest of the game and thus offering an option to pick other specialties in later eras. Even the Babylonian-Greek combo is enough to carry through the rest of the game.
    • Korean (or Joseon, as known in-game) culture brings it to the next level. Since Scientific cultures have access to technologies of the next era without having to advance to it, and Joseon has particularly good science multiplier, it allows to clear the tech tree out of Industrial era technologies, while still in Early Modern. More, it's the only scientific culture of that era, so picking it means you gain the absolute technological lead, as nobody else can access Industrial tech without advancing to the related era.
  • Luxury resources offer faction-wide bonuses, some of them pretty substantial, while being relatively common. Highlights include, but aren't limited to: Silk^note A very common resources that adds +1 to each and every Makers Quarter's production output, and it's likely to have 3 or more units of Silk, Gold^note +2% income a piece, which by late game can mean hundreds of bonus income, Gemstone^note +2 on Market Quarter, again relatively common and Mercury^note +2% of Science, which often is spawned right next to Lead^note +2 Science per Researcher
  • Mongol Horde, a special unit for Mongolian culture. It might not be the strongest unit, but it is highly mobile ranged cavalry that multiplies like the starting Neolitic hunters: all the ransack counts as food, and once the threshold is crossed, a new unit spawns within the army. In very quick succession a single unit can transform into an entire army, and those into another, becoming real Horde and simply overwhelming whatever is on their path. Best part is that you can switch from whatever previous culture to Mongols, do all the conquest you need at this stage of the game and then go back to whatever other focus you were pursuing.
• Obvious Beta: In addition to a plethora of minor bugs there are some game destroying bugs that weren't fixed before the launch. These all came after the game had already been delayed. The devs get some credit for actually taking on board player feedback from pre-release alpha & beta tests but it was still a pretty poor launch overall.
  • The release state of the game crashed upon loading the map for every third player, making it outright impossible to play.
  • There a chance it will enter debug mode on its own, but with no ability to turn it off other than reloading and hoping for the best. This wasn't fixed even three years after the premiere.
  • There was also a cascading bug that disabled descriptions in the game and replaces them with filename placeholders.
  • All of that without even mentioning the wide plethora of minor, but omnipresent bugs spread around. It took months to iron them out, and some still persist.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the earlier builds, there was no bottom limit on how many instances of given strategic resource is being spawned, which means you could end up with a world with not enough (sometimes zero) important resources like saltpetre, oil or uranium. Which renders certain buildings and especially units impossible to build, as they require minimal number of specific resources to be accessible at given time. Thus by advancing your technology, you might very easily end up with no means to build the new units, while in the same time no longer able to produce the old ones. It also can render one of the possible end game triggers - Martian base - impossible to construct. Fun. It was eventually partially fixed by providing a bottom amount of resources spawning globally, but there still might be not enough of them for late game structures and units.
  • You can not change the spot on which you've started building a wonder. Even if the construction is cancelled, the spot is still reserved and blocked and no other place or city can build it. This includes random misclicks - either you reload, or you're screwed.
  • All city districts have to be connected with either the city or at least the administrative center^note former outpost added to the city, and that means operating in other territory than the city itself that's part of the city. In practice this means filling half of the area with useless or non-essential districts, just to get to the spot for perfect cluster of districts.
• So Okay, It's Average: It received poor critical reviews and didn't generate much buzz from fans of the 4x genre beyond its initial launch window. One big complaint was that compared to Endless Legend and Endless Space, the move to a real world inspiration caused the game to lack Amplitude's signature world-building, factional narrative storylines and the gorgeous, futuristic & alien aesthetics of their other titles.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Terrain type. Thanks to the way how the synergies work and how simplified are the options of what kind of district can be build, aside of presence or lack of a river, it doesn't matter one bit what the tile is, because it can be made just as productive market, farm or factory.
  • Population. Unlike other Amplitude games, where almost entire output of your faction was tied with its population (and type of it), Humankind first and foremost uses the districts instead, with pops being just an afterthought to the sheer amount of raw profit generated by districts. This also by proxy renders anything food- and farming-related just as underused, as there is no real need to get those going.
  • Naval combat. AI barely even goes to sea and after certain technologies, land units no longer even need ships for transport. All while few cultures have a ship as their special unit.

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