"The Humans: Meet the Ancestors" is an ancient Nintendo DS game from 2009. It's a whopping 15 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.
This is just another rejected 2D platformer from the Nintendo DS (you know, the handheld that has Mario on it so that's the platformer that people play). You may be wondering why a crap rejected 1990's Nintendo DS game belongs on Steam and the answer is, you're right, it doesn't. This is another abandonware cash grab by the gravediggers at Piko Interactive, who swindle their hands onto old abandoned/broken/dead games then try to swindle Steam gamers into paying them for someone else's old abandoned game. Ethical? Nope.
Gameplay is mediocre in this puzzle platformer. The only thing it's got going for it is cutesy claymation looking models rather than garbage pixel "art", once more showing us that pixel "art" is just a crutch from lazy devs who can't do graphics properly. The gameplay is really uninspired, you "rescue" cavemen and get to the "hut" objective in every puzzle platformer level. The action is slow and plodding... I'm not sure if the developers had any kind of gamer experience in mind at all, this feels more like a design project with a bunch of boxes to tick before shipping as fast as possible. Such design strategy doesn't result in winning games, as we can see from this result.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky, sluggish and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
Because this is designed for handhelds, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for handhelds forces upon a game.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
"The Humans: Meet the Ancestors" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $10 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Hearts of Iron IV", "Europa Universalis IV" or "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.
Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.
