Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Reviews
Help your early ancestors tame a savage landscape and evolve towards modern humans.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey has rewarding survival gameplay at its core, but it has too much early imbalance and repetition before you can find it.
I started to criticize the game for not giving me the answers to its frustrating moments, but then I took a step back and realized that is all part of the game. There is no going back to try again with your lineage. If you fail, you have to deal with your failure. Sometimes it's a simple mistake that you can recover from. Other times, it's a critical mistake like killing off your last male and being left with only females and the generations cease to be. It just goes to show how closely actions and consequences go hand and hand.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is one of a kind, but it works more in theory than in practice.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a beautiful, ambitious game of evolution. Unfortunately, the sheer initial difficulty, repetitiveness, and discouragement associated with some of the mechanics and replayability will likely limit this title to only those most dedicated to seeing the game through to the end. For a lack of better words, it feels as if this game needs to go through a bit of evolution itself in order to smooth the roughness and make players want to journey through this odyssey.
An interesting experience that will divide players.
Despite some repeated combat and the boring management system, it's fun to play as a gorilla and explore jungles.
Review in Chinese | Read full review
Yet despite its complicated objectives, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey challenges players to think outside the box by using contemporary, evolved knowledge to survive in a prehistoric world.
A survival game that feels like a puzzle and plays a bit awkwardly. Overall, a brain-burning but enjoyable experience.
Ancestors is a fantastic translation of evolutionary concepts into a game. It presents a fully-realized world that forces you to pay attention to every last detail if you want to survive.
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.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an ambitious take on the survival genre that is hampered by poor design choices
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a breath of fresh air in the sandbox/survival genre. At the same time, the original atmosphere and compelling gameplay is blended with some subpar elements that ought to discourage many players – and there’s too much repetitiveness.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an ambitious game whose conceptual vision is the very thing that bogs it down. There's a lot of unexplained expectations of the player, and, by the time those are worked out, it's easy to become bored or frustrated with it. Very likely, both. Combined with abundant technical problems, there isn't a lot to praise about Ancestors and even less to recommend.
The evolution simulator offers a lively, original world, but grind and half-baked ideas leave a bland aftertaste.
Review in German | Read full review
While the idea of being able to influence the evolution of your clan of apes seems novel and exciting the reality is that it's a bit of a repetitive slog. Through bad decisions or sheer bad luck, it's far too easy to wipe out your whole clan which means that you'll have to start all over again from the beginning. It's an interesting experience but one that's tough to recommend to anyone but the most patient of gamers.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a wonderful idea that fails to deliver on almost every level. While it can be breath-taking to look at, it is a tedious chore and needlessly unforgiving. I applaud Patrice Désilets and his team for attempting something new and fresh, but great ideas alone do not make for great games.
Our ancestors didn't have it easy, and that's the for-better-and-worse message reverberating through every interaction in the game.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey puts humanity's evolutionary past in your hands and leaves you to figure out the rest. The unstructured gameplay is more frustrating than compelling.
Ancestors Humankind Odyssey is a game which we embody the deans of humanity, immersed in the fascinating, extremely immersive and often moving adventure of the great story of life. However, Panache Digital Games has not completely managed to offer a game always technically up to the originality of his proposal. It is nonetheless a singular experience that arouses great sympathy and for which it would be a shame to miss out, especially if the few really disabling design flaws were to be corrected soon.
Review in French | Read full review