 I had the tremendous pleasure of taking part in the very first open-dev weekend of Amplitude Studios' newest game, Humankind. Players take control over the civilization, or town, perhaps, of Babylon over the span of 30 turns in a world ready for the taking, all to offer some actionable feedback for the development team as Amplitude gears up for their latest games 2021 release. So here I am, asking the important questions and answering them for you, dear viewer. What is Humankind? It is a forex strategy game, an acronym that stands for the four pillars in which the basic tenets of the genre rest. Explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. If you've never heard of Humankind, this is the project Amplitude has been gearing up towards for a while now. A direct competitor to Sid Meier's civilization series, aiming to do what Sid does, but better. And with suede fans unhappy with the recent direction Civilization 6 has gone in these past few years, Humankind couldn't have found a better time to stake its territory. How does this compete with civilization in ways that Amplitude's previous forex strategy Endless Legend didn't? Humankind is a historical forex, where Endless Legend was a fantasy one. Same genre, but the historical elements ground humanity in a way that simply wasn't possible with Endless Legend. In place of incomprehensible resources the pre-alpha build of humankind I played had such resources as marble, horses, pearls and many others, both strategic and luxury, which will be recognizable to civilization players and humankind at large. That's a little pun I've worked in there for your viewing pleasure. But that's not the only difference, of course more importantly when you've got a historical strategy game you're capable of creating your own alternate history, dictating it with your actions. Look at the tech trees reveals another big shift in design. Endless Legends has a radial tech tree which humankind decided to forfeit for the sake of a tech tree much more similar, nearly identical in fact to that of civilization. Linear but branching out clusters of technologies differentiated across the historical ages of our own development. Settling territories has also been reworked. At least in this build every unit had the ability to create a settlement in a neutral territory. These settlements can either be grown into cities of their own, or they can be assimilated in the greater territory of another city. In this design decision humanity breaks not only from Civ but also from Endless Legend, both all the games made use of settler units. It's an interesting system and I'm eager to see how it will work when coupled with other factions or grasping for the same territory. Combat functions differently than it does in Civilization 6, with a system that aims to improve on the turn-based grid combat in Endless Legend. Seeing as this scenario was sparse on enemies other than deer, the original foe of humankind, I shall save judgment for this aspect of the game later. I'm intrigued for what it's worth. All four strategy games in fact all turn-based strategy games aim to keep the player glued to the chair, desperate to play just one more turn, a phrase painfully familiar to every Civilization player past and present. This one however manages to nail that feeling from the get go, and in a way that Civilization 6 for one has been less successful of doing, at least for me, and don't even get me started on the music. I'll leave a stretch of the game at the end of the video, free of my grating voice, for you all to experience the bloody music. The few tracks I heard were stunning, beautiful pieces that I could spend dozens of hours listening to. Talk about music enhancing gameplay. It's a rare thing to go into a pre-alpha excited for a game, and walk away from it even more so. But after playing humankind's Babylon scenario, I'm more eager than ever to see amplitude's vision for this game realized. I might have played this for less than an hour, but had I the opportunity to progress past those thirty turns, I would have sunk another five hours easy before I knew what was happening. It's a strange experience to be so enchanted with a game this early on, but a wonderful experience as well. I'm eager to take part in the next open dev weekend, and I will be sure to bring you more news and more of my thoughts about humankind. Until then, thank you for watching, viewer! If you enjoyed this video, share it with your friends and fellow gamers on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, all that social nonsense. Leave me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and tell me in the comments below, are you excited about humankind? Thank you also to my friends at the Fantasy Hive blog, who have been kind enough to allow me my own column all about gaming news, reviews and previews. If you enjoy SFF books, that's science, fiction and fantasy, for the non-enlightened among you, you might want to come join us at the Hive. You'll walk away with some excellent book recommendations, for example, T.L. Greylock's recent release, Shadow Survivory, which nicely connects to this video because it involves archaeology in magic, but archaeology is the important one, because you can have that without a nice helping of history. Alternate history works as well as anything, doesn't it? At any rate, I'll see you next time. Bye!