Mankind is a curiously different sort of game. I’ve only been playing a few days now, so don’t take this as an exhaustive review or anything, but those few days have kind of reminded me of what the whole thing is about, sort of.
Essential, it’s an MMO RTS, based in space and on various planetary surfaces. You start life with a ‘Vibz’ class construction spaceship, a modest pile of credits, 500 settlers, and a Destiny, and form there you’re on your own. The first steps of the game focus on a very involved infrastructure creation exercise, as you scout out planets with suitable resources to mine, and then turn into base structures, new units, space structures and so on. All of these new units need to be researched in your laboratories, and the whole thing needs to be paid for somehow as well.
Presumably, later stages of the game involve competition for the rarer resources, trading with other players, alliances, guilds and massive RTS battles.
Three Good Things:
Involved: The depth of tech trees available, and the complexity of gathering the various necessary resources together in one place make for an extremely involving empire-game, in the grand tradition of Civilisation and Age of Empires, and will greatly appeal to the Builder type of RTS person. Optimising and running an empire of any real size is likely to be a real challenge, given the level of micromanagement needed. The units and structures are satisfyingly substantial, and seeing world and sector maps fill up with your own radar dots is quite rewarding.
Stylish: Despite getting on for eight years old, the art direction and look-n-feel of the units, setting and UI still seem relatively fresh and inspired; Vibes’ original designs of elegant futuristic bases and vehicles have aged fairly well.
Casual: The pace of play seems largely dictated by the cycles of mining, stockpiling and construction. Units and structures persist while offline, and continue to mine, build, defend and what-have-you, channelling resources mined into linked warehouses. These fill up during the day, and once capacity has been reached, the whole lot shuts down. This tends to mean that upon logging, the average play session is taken up mostly by using up these resources – manufacturing new structures and units, or selling to the NPC star base for extra cash. This makes for an almost ‘Play By Email’ experience; perhaps a good half hour of setting new instructions, maybe longer to plan new infrastructure or persue wars, and then logging off and leaving the empire to get on with the new orders. There seems very little benefit in spending seven hours at a time in there, as the previous day’s mined resources are likely to be consumed well before that.
Three Bad Things:
Dated: While the style of the art is fairly robust, the execution of it isn’t. The game runs in a painfully apparent maximum resolution of 800x600, with none of the twinkley goodness we take for granted today; lighting, pixel shading, particle effects, etc. The ‘Recommended Spec’ is: 300MHz Pentium II, 64MB Ram, 8Mb Ram Video Card and a 56kbps net connection. This effectively means anyone can play it, but does mean it’s unlikely to shine by today’s standards.
Fallible: While the instinct is to dig into the infrastructure with a reckless abandon, it soon becomes apparent that it is easily possible to totally screw up your empire with poor planning, to the point where the whole thing needs to be torched and started from scratch. The website account details even have a ‘Reset Account’ option for precisely this purpose. The danger seems to come chiefly form the ‘Settlers’ resource. All units and structures need a crew, and the ability to replenish these is not easy to set up, involving a pretty complex resource shopping list, and a bit of advanced planning on locations and technologies.
Desolate: Unlike most online games, in Mankind, the player is not really a solid presence – there is no ‘Command Carrier’, or ‘Leader’ unit; instead, the player is an ephemeral force manifested only in the movement of the occasional unit. While you are informed when another player enters the same world or space view that you are in, it rarely seems to make any difference. Global chat channels do seem to exist, but I’ve yet to see anyone use one, and the only way I know I’m not totally alone in there, is that sometimes I see ships move, which I didn’t order. The PBEM nature of basic play does little to encourage interaction, and in most cases ‘meeting’ another active player seems more accident than design.
Granted, I am in the ‘Trial Universe’ – perhaps the ‘Original Universe’ is a little more lively, but I suspect the first contact I’m likely to have with another player is when I log in one evening to find someone has swatted my bases off the face of each world. It all seems to contribute to a culture of silence, in which is becomes difficult to find a reason or motivation to attack others, beyond ‘because there’s nothing else to do’. The message boards show a similarly eerie silence, and although they are used, it hardly seems a bustling community kind of game. I suspect that much like EVE Online, the social options consist mostly of either joining a guild, or facing a game life of absolute isolation. Perhaps in Mankind's case, this is all just a natural consequence of it being so ancient and wound down...
I kind of like it in some ways, but much of this is personal nostalgia – as an objective gaming experience, I’m not sure there’s a lot there that you couldn’t get from any number of similar, single-player offline titles - Homeworld, Alpha Centauri, Imperium Galactica, Earth 2150 to name but a few. The essential ‘multiplayer’ aspect of it seems strangely silent, certainly at this very early Trial Newbie stage.
It is an interesting piece of MMO Living History however, and worth a look for that, if nothing else.
They offer three types of account; the Trial, which consists of a free fully-functional account, in a distinct ‘Trial Universe’, limited to one calendar month; a Shareware Account, with limited tech-tree and unit access, of indefinitely duration, in the main ‘Original Universe’ and ‘International Universe’ (Which I gather in this case, means ‘Not Chinese’…the shoe being on the other foot this time and all); and the proper paid up Full Account – unlimited access to the Original and International Universes. I couldn’t actually find a price tag anywhere, without going through a signup, so no idea how much they’d want a month for that, but two out of the above three types of account are free anyway, and probably more than you’ll need to see what it’s all about.
It’s probably unfair to sum up after only four or five days, but I think I’d have to recommend EVE Online over this title, simply because even at it’s mining dullest, EVE seems far more alive, but many EVE Players could do worse than enjoy a fortnights holiday in Mankind’s Trial Universe, seeing how things have changed in the last eight years…