Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Reviews
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.
The evolution simulator offers a lively, original world, but grind and half-baked ideas leave a bland aftertaste.
Review in German | 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.
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 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.
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.
A survival game that feels like a puzzle and plays a bit awkwardly. Overall, a brain-burning but enjoyable experience.
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.
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
An interesting experience that will divide players.
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.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is one of a kind, but it works more in theory than in practice.
Review in Italian | Read full review
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 has rewarding survival gameplay at its core, but it has too much early imbalance and repetition before you can find it.
Help your early ancestors tame a savage landscape and evolve towards modern humans.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a game that wanted to be so much but in that desire ended up being so little. A repetitive cycle of slowly walking around the jungle avoiding predators while visiting landmarks that all look the same and cranking out babies that know just a little bit more than their parents. It's a game that achieved nothing but mediocracy despite its legendary pedigree.
The story of our evolution as a species is brought to life in this beautifully crafted third-person open-world survival adventure.
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 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.