Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Reviews
So far, I have put about six hours total into the game between both sessions. I am very excited to learn how to weild a weapon to kill predators, and to explore more into the jungle. This has been a really unique and challenging experience, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. You can get Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey on PC via the Epic Games store on August 27th, and for PS4 and Xbox One in December of 2019. It's currently retailing for $39.99
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 is a great step forward for the survival genre. It has all the pieces you'd expect, including water and food requirements but also a few unique ones. All of these tie into the game in a much better way than in most other survival games. Plus, its narrative of guiding humankind through its early evolution in prehistoric Africa makes for a great story to play in a beautiful place to do it.
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.
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
A survival game that feels like a puzzle and plays a bit awkwardly. Overall, a brain-burning but enjoyable experience.
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 story of our evolution as a species is brought to life in this beautifully crafted third-person open-world survival adventure.
An interesting specimen that would’ve benefitted from annoying tedium and clunky controls being weeded out of its gene pool.
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.
Help your early ancestors tame a savage landscape and evolve towards modern humans.
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
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 rejects mass appeal and instead favors a grueling but awe-inspiring look at our earliest ancestors.
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.