Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Ancestors is not a stereotypical game: its mix of survival game and roleplay elements enhances an adventure as imperfect as it is precious, and definitely deserving of the spotlight.

Ancestors is the basis of what could be a very good survival game once it's been patched, or for a second opus. It's hard to learn, very repetitive, but once you got the first few hours in, it starts to reveal its potential.

Ancestors Humankind Odyssey is a game which we embody the deans of humanity, immersed in the fascinating, extremely immersive and often moving adventure of the great story of life. However, Panache Digital Games has not completely managed to offer a game always technically up to the originality of his proposal. It is nonetheless a singular experience that arouses great sympathy and for which it would be a shame to miss out, especially if the few really disabling design flaws were to be corrected soon.

Ancestors The Humankind Odyssey is a unique game. You must guide your clan through time and evolution, which is fun with lots of experimentation. There's also a lot of frustration to be had however. Still, the game offers a special experience.

Ancestors develops an incredibly ambitious idea, and to some extend, it does achieve its purpose. There are moments that are simply incredible, although its repetitive mechanics get in the way often that we would’ve liked.

A survival game that feels like a puzzle and plays a bit awkwardly. Overall, a brain-burning but enjoyable experience.

In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, survival is easy once you decipher the basic mechanics of evolution and sit through the cutscenes, but the journey is full of moments of discovery.

This is simply a game too ambitious for the budget available, which tries to dwell on the farming, but with good ideas on his side.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey does something genuinely original with the survival genre; no matter how often I've missed a jump and splattered on the jungle floor or got blindsided by a panther I kept on playing. Every time I've been infuriated, I've come back for more. It may lack a concrete story, but you'll find yourself writing little stories in your head as you roam – the time you dodged that giant eagle, or distracted a tiger just long enough for your fellow primate to reach a tree. If Panache can squash most of the bugs, this could be a Game of the Year contender.

Initial bewilderment gives way to fascination as you understand what Ancestors is trying to do, but fiddly controls and a lack of hand-holding leads to frustration.

Ancestors:The Humankind Odyssey is a mixed experience. The idea behind the game which takes you through 8 million years of human evolution is wonderful, but on the other side forces many limitations on the developers, and in the end you'll either fall in love with it or hate it.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is one of a kind, but it works more in theory than in practice.

In the end, Ancestors is a fine experiment that I’m sure will interest a lot of people, but I must say it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. As fun as it is to run around and climb stuff, leading a group of apes into a bigger group of somewhat smarter apes is not exactly an exhilarating proposition – especially when you can easily screw up to the point of losing the clan, not finding a surrogate, and having to restart the game and relearn everything all over again. If the idea of playing through evolution without any guidance and getting your ass kicked by nature appeals to you, then definitely give Ancestors a chance – it’s the kind of experience you’re probably not getting from anywhere else.

The marvel of evolution gives way to a gameplay loop that quickly irritates without enough variety to spice it up, which, when combined with poor combat, fiddly controls, and repetitive crafting, all add up to an experience that might drive you bananas.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey teaches us the evolution of humanity. But the game is not very successful in terms of mechanics.

There are fantastic ideas at work here, but the confusing opening hours and an abundance of repetitive tasks will put a lot of people off.

Guiding a clan of primates through generations as they evolve certainly makes for a unique experience, and there are times when Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey comes together. But a lack of guidance on basic gameplay mechanics, as well as some clumsy controls and unsuccessfully executed ideas, make for a highly uneven game.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey begins 10 million years in the past and puts you in control of our evolutionary forefathers. You must guide them on their path toward humanity, which means teaching them how to fish, how to hunt, and how to walk on two legs. Ancestors executes its vision of our evolutionary past with care, but it just isn’t very fun to play.

At its core, this mixture of action-adventure, evolution and prehistoric survival is interesting, but held back massively by a bunch of cumbersome and badly explained mechanics as well as clumsy controls.

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.

A novel premise wrapped in an awkward and repetitive survival slog.

Poor climbing and fighting aside, the gameplay loop is mind-numbingly tedious: eat, drink, make babies, sleep. Keep doing that for hours, and you’ll unlock one semi-useful perk or another, so you can eat, sleep and drink some more. [Issue#240, p.40]

In summary, you’ll know if Ancestors is up your alley pretty quick. And kudos to you, I genuinely hope you enjoy it, so they can make more games that are this out there. It’s something the industry absolutely needs even if they’re not ready for me yet. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it and who knows? 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.

This might be a game coming from Patrice Désilets, it is not a very convincing one. The first ten hours of this survival game are mysterious and exciting, but then all that's left is mediocre gameplay.

I was deeply frustrated by Ancestors, so it may seem strange for me to say that I found a lot of promise, complexity, and nuance here as well. The novel concept and grand scope are far more appealing than dozens of other action or survival games on the market. This is a deeply flawed but richly imagined effort, but like many ambitious gaming projects at launch in recent years, it can now either die off like the Neanderthals, or evolve into something better from here.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey wants to offer a kind of pseudo-realistic experience from the past, but forgets that there is a modern person behind the buttons who just wants to be entertained.

A survival with a fascinating setting and fresh ideas that is horribly let down by its endless repetition.

Despite its problems, and they're not insignificant, Ancestors has an unusual magnetism. [Issue#337, p.116]

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 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 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.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a bold experiment that really leans into putting players in situations where they have to be creative and resourceful without any hand-holding. Gamers who kick a kick out of the survival genre (like these 10 great survival titles) and love the pressure of finding that next source of food or safe place to sleep will likely get a lot of enjoyment out of Ancestors once they adjust to the controls, but it will likely feel a bit too challenging and aimless for the average gamer.

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.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a brilliant tech demo for an RPG system that has the potential to revolutionize the way we progress our characters in games, I just wish it there had been a little less proof of concept and a little more fun.

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.