Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey takes place 10 million years before the dawn of mankind. It's the story of ape to proto-human evolution, emphasizing the dangers that forced our fuzzy ancestors to learn the skills necessary for human success.
Taking place in prehistoric Africa, Ancestors throws the player-controlled monkey straight into the jungle without any instructions. In fact, a recurring gameplay theme is that to succeed in this cruel primeval world, you'll need to learn from your mistakes, using trial and error to craft tools, find food, and support the rest of your clan of monkeys. . The ultimate goal is to learn, thrive, and climb the evolutionary ladder while navigating the dangerous world around you.
The concept is certainly original and exciting, but it is a survival game in mind. Throughout the day, you'll need to maintain your water intake, ensure your monkey eats enough, and deal with the fear that arises when you leave the safety of your clan. To determine the environment around you, you can use and train your primate senses (sight, sound, smell, etc.). Key objects you can interact with will appear on screen, along with distant locations offering a new glimpse into the game's vast world. wild animal that stands still and uses its senses to create a clearer picture of the environment around it.
When you are not at a standstill, you will be able to try to become a full-fledged king of swingers. As you move through the jungle and approach a tree trunk or rock face, you automatically start climbing. Reach the top and you can leap from branch to branch in some of the game's most thrilling sequences. Unfortunately, those moments are often marred by clumsy controls and a few too many drops, when the proper branches to land on are scarce. However, during the early hours of the game, when you're unprepared for the threat posed by dangerous wildlife on the ground, finding safety in cover is the difference between survival and death.
Speaking of the dangers lurking in the jungle, your monkey is prone to fear-induced hysteria. As the fear of the unknown builds, you will gradually lose control of your character. It is therefore essential to monitor this measurement as closely as you feel thirsty or hungry. But what exactly are you afraid of? The thick foliage of the jungle hides a plethora of predators that pose a threat to the unarmed monkeys. Exploration of the world is interrupted by the wild hunt of wildcats, ambush crocodiles and opportunistic eagles that make survival a constant struggle. At the start of the game, it is difficult to avoid these interactions, and with the game's difficult dodging system, it is extremely difficult to emerge from these encounters unscathed.
Luckily, as the ancestors progress, your tribe begins to learn new skills, and the tools you'll get used to (sharpened rocks and sticks) allow you to better master the dangers of the jungle. As the game revolves around the process of evolution, each friction in adversity will increase your clan's accumulated knowledge. Once you accumulate enough experience, you can upgrade the gene pool (essentially a skill tree) with new abilities. In the menu, you can create and grow neural pathways, highlighting the best qualities of the previous generation and leaving the drawbacks behind. After a certain point in the game, you will also be able to evolve the evolution from 15 to 100 years. These leaps in evolution reflect the speed of actual evolution, and as the game progresses, you may see your clans of monkeys becoming more and more human.
While this system is neat, it has some big downsides. By bad play or pure bad luck, it is quite possible that your clan will be completely eliminated, forcing you to start the procedures again with a new line. You may have to re-learn the vast majority of skills you acquired with your last clan, which can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming. Again, this is a good reflection of what's happening in the natural world, but there needs to be a better balance between realism and gamification. After all, gamers often don't have the time or the idea to do the exact same thing over and over again!
This game, however, excels in incredible attention to visual detail, whether it's the impressive and realistic monkey animations or the thrill of seeing an aggressive saber-toothed tiger for the first time. The prehistoric world surrounding the animals also looks fantastic, its ecosystem presented as an endless tangle of trees and Savannah just waiting to be explored. It's a shame that actually exploring it can be so frustrating.
Conclusion
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey has enormous genetic potential, but endless repetition and clumsy controls must be stripped from its DNA. For hardcore survival and exploration enthusiasts, it's a rewarding experience, but for everyone else, it's so repetitive it'll drive you bananas.
- An original and ambitious concept
- A beautiful world to explore
- Repetitive and tedious mechanics can quickly become frustrating
- Unpleasant controls make gameplay harder than it should be
- Complete lack of instruction may be true in the jungle, but it generally exasperates the experience.
Not bad 6/10
Scoring policy
Revision copy provided by the private division
