For this review, I went back in time to relive the evolution of the human race. Panache Digital Games gives us the opportunity to go through what our ancestors had to do in their new game; Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Panache Digital Games has to keep up its reputation as it is created by Patrice Désilets, the creator of a couple Assasin’s Creed game. So let’s dive into the revolution and see what it’s all about and if it’s worth to go through the evolution once again.
What do you do? In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, you control a primate with who you will have to survive, explore and stay alive in order to help the primate clan evolve into a new species. During the game, you will have to manage your health, dodge or fight off predators and explore new areas in the dark jungle.
- Graphics: One of the best features of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is its graphics. The game looks absolutely fantastic! When you launch the game, there is a group of primates sitting on the ground and I was immediately like damn, this looks really nice. And the best off all, the in-game graphics also look really great, everything is really detailed and it provides you with a feeling of you wanting to explore more and more just to see what everything looks like.
- Climbing/swinging around: Another aspect of the game that is really enjoyable is that you can almost climb everything in order to explore new areas or to just have a nice view of the jungle. And what it even makes better that you can jump out the trees and just swing around to other ones. It gives you the monkey feeling, with some lovely mechanics.
- Intelligence: A thing that might be frustrating is the usage of your intelligence and senses. It is used in order to discover things and explore new kinds of stuff. But you never get a good explanation of what to use and when to use it. And this is really frustrating because it is such a big part of the game. On the other hand, it is quite challenging that you don’t exactly know what to do with it since you are reliving the evolution and back then they also didn’t have a clue on what was happening.
- No information: Another frustration I had to deal with while playing the game, was the lack of information. It is not a game with a goal that you need to achieve followed by advancing to the next level. You just need to wander around, eat, drink and sleep in time and just explore. This, of course, can be nice and challenging but a little more information about what to do would have been made the game a lot better.
- Purpose?: I kinda mentioned it already, but the purpose of the game is kind of vague. While playing I knew that I had to explore in order to evolve but that’s about it. And it’s fun for the first 20 minutes but after a while, you won’t have any idea what you are supposed to do and it really made the good feeling I had about this game drop drastically. The first few times I even just closed the game for a while because it was really annoying me.
- Grind: When you finally have a little idea of what´s needed to be done in order to book progression in the game, it starts feeling like a grind. You just have to explore, scan things with your intelligence and repeat that for a numerous amount of time. And if you really really really love this game, I´m sure you will like this but I absolutely hated it. You are just doing the same thing over and over again with no idea when you are actually booking progress or when you are doing it for nothing.
Score: 45%
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey looks really nice and has some nice mechanics which are really enjoyable but that’s about it. The rest of the game is questionable. The game is fun when you are playing for a short amount of time, but when you are playing it for a couple of hours, it gets really frustrating and you want to have nothing to do with the game anymore. It gets grindy without a real purpose. And I’m sure that there are people who will love this and will really enjoy this. But I’m sure most of you will uninstall it after a while.
Developer: Panache Digital Games Publisher: Private Division
Tested on: PC
Also available on: PlayStation 4 & Xbox One (release date: December 2019)
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