izigame.me

I don't play 4x games in general. I haven't played any of the Civilization games, and I probably never will. However, when I got this game, I began to understand the appeal. A lot of people seemed to have issues with it when it was first released, but I never really did. Humankind started pretty good and decently interesting, and by now I'd consider it very good and downright enthralling.
Things I consider very cool:
The Age/Culture system is great. If you get hung up on the historical possibility of one culture growing into a completely unrelated culture, you may have a worse time, but as far as I'm concerned it's cool and fun.
The developers seem to be constantly bringing out new stuff, fixes, improvements, and so on. It's not always a hit, but in my opinion just being as dedicated as they are is a positive.
The game looks great. The UI is good, the symbology is clear and easy to learn, and there's plenty of fun little details in each hex if you look for them, many of which will change over the Ages.
Being able to build custom AI personas with behaviours and perks that you unlock by completing achievements is a very cool idea. Some of them can be VERY distinct, and it almost feels like a shame that the devs didn't think of making some of these archetypes themselves... But they do have plenty of different personas in the game, so that's probably not fair.
Things I consider mixed:
Every culture has an affinity to one of the pillars of the game. Agrarian, militarist, expansionist, etc. Playing in line with your culture's affinity grants extra fame, which is cool. Each of the affinities has a special ability which is on a cooldown (that varies depending on game speed). This is also cool, theoretically. Practically, however, a couple of the abilities are almost never worth using, a couple of them are decent, and a couple of them are so much better than the rest that it really doesn't quite feel fair.
Speaking of fairness, while the AI serves its purpose, and some of them can even become distinct over the course of several games in which you see them... It's not top of the line, by any means. Rather than actually improving the AI, increasing difficulty past a certain point just gives them increasing bonuses when they fall behind. As a result, it can very much feel like the AI just cheats, rather than being well programmed.
The game has challenges, which were released over the years and unlock sigil customization and a few AI personas. The challenges themselves are fine. Some of them essentially require you to do things that no player would ever naturally do, but that's not so bad. The problem comes from the fact that when I launch Humankind, it's basically a coinflip whether or not these challenges will actually be available - and if the challenges aren't, the rewards from ones you've completed aren't either. I looked around a little and saw that this might be because the game thinks I have mods... Which I don't, and so I can only consider it a problem.
Multiplayer in Humankind is a ton of fun! It enhances the game immensely, even if you play almost exclusively with the godforsaken human-shaped offspring of a tortoise and a sloth and a 4 hour game takes the whole day! However... connection issues seem to be common, certain mechanics don't quite seem to work right (in particular my friend reports that the Bribe mechanic doesn't seem to work at all for him when he's playing with me), and if you're friendly with another human player, the AI tends to get steamrolled even worse than usual.
Things I think are pretty much just bad:
The balancing is pretty much fucked. Culture, technologies, civics, and religion ALL have routes by which you can wildly outpace and outmatch the rest of the game. Especially rough is if you play with the "New World" setting, leading to the first person to make it to the new world and start colonizing gaining a massive advantage. The fact that the Phoenicians can theoretically do this in the FIRST Age (discounting neolithic) is wildly unfair.
Now... The balancing being fucked is technically bad... But at the same time, I can't deny that it's a LOT of fun to make use of the extremely broken stuff available. Steamrolling AIs is a lot of fun, and steamrolling friends who are not quite as in tune with the busted shit or who are too honourable to use it can be too. However, for any game where multiplayer is a serious consideration, it is obviously a problem. If it were up to me, I'd adjust things up so that EVERYTHING feels equally insane instead of adjusting things down so that nothing does... but it does need adjusting, probably. In the meantime, though, it's a ton of fun anyways, and definitely invokes the feeling of "one more turn" that I hear used to be endemic to Civilization before they started badly copying their competition.