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.
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.
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.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey promised so much, but it ultimately isn't any fun to play. The lack of direction, the clumsy controls and unwieldy mechanics make this a huge missed opportunity that just doesn't hang together as an experience. The DNA of a great idea may be here, but it needs a significant amount of evolution before it can become realised.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an unfulfilling survival game, one that never provides a compelling reason to see its journey all the way through.
A tiresome and unforgiving survival game that purposefully makes things as difficult and repetitive as possible, while offering very little in the way of entertainment.
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 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.
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 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.
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: The Humankind Odyssey was such an interesting idea on paper but from its complex and unexplained environment to the severe lack of exciting objectives and goals to work towards, the game doesn't quite manage to entice the player to make the very best of humanity.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey replicates the fumbling, trial-and-error progress of evolution, which often isn't fun, but there are monkeys in the game, and that is brilliant.
For every cool "a-ha!" moment in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, there has been something that has me on the verge of rage quitting. There's a fascinating, novel concept in Ancestors, but with so many bugs and other tedious issues blocking it, the joy of this survival game feels like it's constantly kept millions of years and a bundle of evolutionary feats away.
A bright idea made dull by constant repetition and diminishing rewards.
I may come back later when it’s had time to sit with the general population only to really discover its wonders. But for now, my dear reader, I’d rather forget about my ancestors lost to time and play a game like Ape Out instead.
Moments of beauty and distantly spaced moments of sublime discovery are separated by hours and hours of tedium and frustration
A:THO ignores the mechanical DNA that make open world games and survival RPGs so much fun. There's nothing revolutionary about depriving you of map functionality and an adequate tutorial. This isn't an evolution so much as a freak mutation that will die off in the wild. There are other games that achieve what A:THO attempts; play them instead.