Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Reviews
At full price, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anybody except people who truly love the idea of playing as prehistoric human beings trying to discover fire for the first time in the most tedious of ways. It’s obvious that Ancestors is a project made with a lot of passion and ambition. Personally, I found that those elements weren’t properly translated into video game mechanics that actually felt fun or gratifying enough.
Our evolution wasn´t easy, as such Ancestors: The Odyssey of Humanity is not an easy game. Although based on a rather original and interesting idea, the game is quite confusing at first, leading to many not enjoying the game. Moreover, the absence of a campaign makes the game less grater. After all, as we learn how to play, the game can become a little more interesting.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will give the survival experience to you lightly. It punishes you for being careless, but even more when you go back to the beginning and re-do the same thing all over and over again. Initially, you’ll feel rewarded for learning the game, but it disappointingly ends up in repetition and you’ll eventually just close the game and call it quits for mankind’s evolution.
Despite its occasional frustrations, Ancestors is an invigorating and engaging survival game that'll hopefully be followed by more of the same. Each playthrough has the potential to be a bit different as you focus on different skills and spend more time in one biome compared to another, and thanks to the excitingly unsettling freedom it offers and its rewarding highs and lows, Ancestors is well worth the time investment.
Ancestors The Humankind Odyssey is a unique game. You must guide your clan through time and evolution, which is fun with lots of experimentation. There's also a lot of frustration to be had however. Still, the game offers a special experience.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is far from being a title that the mainstream crowd could easily pick up and play. Technical aspects, like the wonky camera and uninviting controls, can be overcome with time, but the camera system and lack of any direction are enough to turn off most people. Stick with it through multiple restarts, however, and you'll discover a title that has loads of fulfilling moments and deep characters you'll get attached to, despite a lack of understandable speech. Games have rarely done something like this, and that fact is amplified when you look at the scope this is trying to cover. If you're looking for a survival title that feels different and distinct, give Ancestors a look.
If Panache can squash most of the bugs, this could be a Game of the Year contender. As is, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is still well worth monkeying about with and I know I’ll be coming back for more.
Ancestors is not a perfect game, and I think it could have benefited from another six months in development. But the overall scope and reach of the game make playing it worthwhile. I hope the developers will let people know more about some of the mechanics used, like the weird mini-map, because players will want to know.Weirdly, I feel ready, somehow, to be left alone in a jungle.
Guiding a clan of primates through generations as they evolve certainly makes for a unique experience, and there are times when Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey comes together. But a lack of guidance on basic gameplay mechanics, as well as some clumsy controls and unsuccessfully executed ideas, make for a highly uneven game.
Ancestors:The Humankind Odyssey is a mixed experience. The idea behind the game which takes you through 8 million years of human evolution is wonderful, but on the other side forces many limitations on the developers, and in the end you'll either fall in love with it or hate it.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Open world survival game with not so funny evolution. There are some good ideas, but gameplay is stereotypical very soon.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Ancestors is very successful when it comes to tell a story about evolution, but it's also successful as a exploration based survival game. You can play Ancestors as a therapy, thanks to its brilliant atmosphere.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
A very unique game about the evolution of man that isn't afraid to drop you in the world and make you figure out everything for yourself, which may turn some people off immediately.
Ancestors rejects mass appeal and instead favors a grueling but awe-inspiring look at our earliest ancestors.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey has some good ideas, but the slow pace and repetitive gameplay will wear you down quickly. Watch some gameplay footage before picking this one up.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey brings a bold and innovative proposal in terms of the theme and mechanics of experimentation and exploration of an inhospitable and dangerous environment, but it carries too much in some of these aspects and, above all, in the need for numerous iterations, which take the game to a sameness that soon replaces the sense of novelty of the early hours.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey aims to tackle the evolution of mankind from our animal forebears, a hefty task for any one piece of media. While the goal is incredibly admirable, Panache Digital Games puts too much on its plate.
Like Spore before it, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey falls victim to its own ambition and fails to be engaging. Too much focus is put on the exceptional amount of immersion, that none is spent on making the game fun.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an ambitious take on the survival genre that is hampered by poor design choices
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an impossibly ambitious game, attempting to summarize the whole of human evolution into the span of a few hours—and succeeding to a surprising degree.