STORY
To my surprise the game does come with a story, and an educational one at that. The game basically tells you a story while teaching you about a society. Explaining if we work together we can progress and how as humans we are all connected more than we think.
GAMEPLAY
Humanity basically plays out like a modern day Lemmings, but feels that much more special with the current hardware available. In the game you are a Shiba Inu and you will use your bark to lay commands for the scores of humans to follow – with the aim of getting them to the light at the end of the level.
Over the seven sequences in the game, you will take on plenty of trials, which do start simple. But, as you progress you will unlock more commands meaning they can get a lot more creative with the solutions. Over the trails you will be giving the humans turn, jump, float, split-up, follow and pause commands to make their way through the sequences.
After completing a couple of sequences you will be faced with a boss fight, where the idea is to destroy the core. Outside of the boss fights you will also start to encounter ‘The Others’, which are enemies you have work around and fight in the trials. You can take these on by arming your humans with either lightsaber like weapons or guns. In some trails you will need to place commands to avoid them or take them on and overpower them, until you can reach their gate and destroy it.
As well as getting to the light at the end of the level, each level includes ‘Goldies’ which are taller gold humans. These are the games collectibles and offer 150 in total to collect, collecting them will unlock new looks and colours for the humans you are commanding. Of course collecting these can come with their own challenges, as in come cases you will need to lead a set amount of humans to a pressure plate – if you have The Others to contend with they might kill too many of your humans to activate these or even steal your Goldies.
The team have also included a level creation tool and the ability for these levels to be published for others. Meaning once you have completed story more, you can start creating your own levels or even checking out the levels that have been published by others. Really giving you plenty of options outside of the story mode to continue enjoying what the team have made.
PRESENTATION
Visually the game is very minimal in design, but also striking at the same time. The levels look very minimalistic in style and are floating above the clouds, as you are guiding hordes of colourfully dressed humans across them- giving it a really nice contrast. However, when The Others enter the trials and you get the weapons to fight them, the sparks of colours as they come together look outstanding – especially on the PSVR2 displays.
As Tha Ltd. and Enhance are involved in Humanity the game comes with an absolutely fantastic soundtrack to keep you entertained as you try and figure out the placements to complete the trail. With the Shiba’s bark being the only other sound you are going to hear in the trails and you lay down your commands.
COMFORT/CONTROLS
As you are in control of the Shiba (in third-person) and the camera angle, there is no reason this game should cause any discomfort for people, and can be played seated, standing or roomscale. However, I just played seated, as there is no real benefit to playing it any other way.
With Humanity the PSVR2 Sense Controllers are optional, and after a short-while I just switched over to using the PS5 controller – it just seemed easier on the controller and the Sense Controllers really didn’t make that much of a difference. You will control the Shiba with the left analogue, rotate the camera with the right and zoom in and out with the D-pad. Left trigger with pause time, right trigger will fast forward time, the bumper buttons will cycle through your commands, Square lays the commands, X will jump and Triangle will pause and zoom out.
LONGEVITY
On my original playthrough I decided I was going to collect all the Goldies before moving onto the next trial, and doing this took me around sixteen hours in total – which I think is a great length for the game. Then there is the user created levels available within the game, so you can move on to these and these range from simple to extremely tough. With a game like this I can see this being very popular with the community, meaning the longevity of the game could be endless.
REVIEWED USING PLAYSTATION VR 2
For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a review code provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a press code does not affect my judgement of the product.
REVIEW OVERVIEW
Enhance Games have done it again and brought something completely different and unique to Virtual Reality with Humanity. Bringing a modern take on Lemmings, and something like the experimental titles we used to see in the PlayStation 2 days – which is fantastic as it seems no one takes risks these days. They have taken these risks and made fantastic and challenging trails, while offering minimal but striking visuals and an outstanding soundtrack. With around a sixteen-hour story mode and then a level creator and user created levels to play, they offer loads of content for the price. To simply put it Humanity should be in every PSVR2 users library.
GAME DETAILS
Release Date: May 16th 2023
Developer: Enhance Games
Publisher: Enhance Games
Price: US $29.99 / CA $39.99 / €29.99 / £24.99
