Human ApexOverreacting Justice Against Animal Kingdom

Game overview

A fox ate every chicken on a farm. The government has responded with two tank platoons, an artillery battery, a drone squadron and you. Human Apex is a singleplayer military sandbox comedy about answering the animal kingdom's misdeeds with wildly disproportionate force.

Each operation starts with an incident in a newspaper and ends with a fenced-off forest, field or beach full of craters. In between, you command heavily armored soldiers, drive the tanks, fly the helicopters and call in the artillery, in whatever mix you like. The animals run, hide, bluff and fight back, and none of it ever really threatens you.

It's not a challenge game and doesn't pretend to be. It's a toy for feeling enormously powerful and laughing at how unfair the fight is, played like a singleplayer Battlefield 2 with Mass Effect 2's squad commands.

Controls and interface

You play in first or third person as any unit in the operation, and you can jump into any other at any moment: a soldier, a tank, a helicopter gunner, a drone operator or an artillery spotter. Every unit is strong enough to handle things alone, so commanding the rest is a convenience, never a requirement.

The HUD carries the shopping list: each culprit species and how many are left. When the last one is dealt with, the operation can end, or you can stay and finish redecorating the area.

Game layers

1. 01 · Moment-to-moment

   Inside the fence

   

   A fenced-off zone: a forest, a farm, a mountainside, a beach, a swamp. Somewhere in it are the culprits. You walk, drive or fly in with whatever you fancy, find them, and deal with them with as much or as little firepower as you like.

   The animals behave like animals. A wolf pack scatters and tries to flank, a bear charges, a snake hides in the grass, a goat climbs where tanks can't. They yelp and flee, bluff and fight back, and the best they can do is knock a soldier on his back.

2. 02 · Low metagame

   A case file

   

   Each operation is one case file, and every case file runs the same proud sequence:

   1. The incidentA headline in the local paper.
   2. The briefingThe culprits, the ground, the shopping list.
   3. The fenceEngineers seal the area; nothing gets out.
   4. The operationYou and the army go in.
   5. The reportThe tally, and the town's front page.

   An operation ends when the shopping list is clear. The after-action report then sets what was deployed against what it was deployed at, in all seriousness: three tanks, forty soldiers, two helicopters and an artillery barrage, for one fox.

3. 03 · High metagame

   A grateful nation

   

   The game's home is the operations room: a map of the country with a pin for every town that has written in. You pick the next case file from there, in any order. New letters keep arriving, because every animal, every kind of ground and every kind of offense combine into new incidents, so the country never runs out of grievances.

   Each finished case puts the town's front page on the operations room wall, reporting your overreaction as a triumph, and turns its pin on the map from red to green. The wall is the record of the whole campaign, and it's the funniest thing in the game to read. It doesn't buy anything.

4. 04 · Practical game flow

   One bad day, one operation

   

   An operation takes fifteen to thirty minutes, depending on the ground and how much you enjoy the scenery. Come home, open a case file, flatten a forest, read the headline, and go to bed lighter.

   The game saves inside the operation too, so you can stop whenever you like and come back to the same fence with the same culprits still hiding.

Game modes

There's one mode: answering case files. What changes from one to the next is the culprit, the ground, and which part of the arsenal suddenly makes sense. A few from the opening batch:

Features and mechanics

1. The heart of it

   Overkill on demand

   The whole military is available for every case file from the first one: infantry in heavy armor with rifles, machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers and flamethrowers; tanks, armored cars and bulldozers; transport and attack helicopters; drones; artillery, mortars and airstrikes; boats and divers where the ground is wet.

   Nothing is bought, earned or upgraded. The only question is what you feel like using, and the honest answer is usually far too much. That's the joke, and the game commits to it: the briefing treats a fox like a hostile army, and the hardware arrives accordingly.

   

2. Be anyone in the operation

   Switch into anything, command the rest

   Every soldier, vehicle and support unit in the operation is yours to play. Ride in as a rifleman, take over the tank when the bear appears, hop into the helicopter to chase the goat up the cliff, and finish from the artillery spotter's binoculars.

   Whoever you're playing can give orders to the squad around them, as in Mass Effect 2: move here, attack that, flush out that thicket, hold, follow. Everyone else carries on sensibly on their own. Each unit is powerful as a standalone, so teamwork is something you play with, not something the game demands.

3. No tedious searching

   The fence and the thermal drone

   

   Before you go in, combat engineers fence the whole zone with cheap barbed wire. It's the game's one natural limit: the culprits can't leave, and you can't wander off into an empty countryside.

   A drone's thermal camera shows where the remaining animals are hiding whenever you ask, so an operation never ends in a long search for the last snake. Finding them is quick; what you do when you get there is the fun.

4. Not a challenge game

   Soldiers who can't lose

   

   The soldiers are heavily armored enough to "eat a wolf for breakfast". An animal can knock one down, stun him or send him tumbling: a bear's swipe puts a soldier on his back, a snake bite leaves him woozy for a minute, a goat can headbutt him off a ledge into a bush. Then he gets up.

   Nobody on your side dies, and no operation can fail. There's no health to manage, no ammunition to ration and no reload screen. The game's whole design is permission: to feel enormously strong for half an hour without being tested on it.

5. Cartoon wildlife

   Animals that act like animals

   Every species has its own behavior, borrowed from the real animal and exaggerated: wolves hunt in packs and flank, bears charge and stand their ground, foxes dive into burrows, snakes vanish into tall grass, sharks circle under the surface, goats climb where vehicles can't follow, owls hunt at night from the treetops, and mosquitoes come as a cloud.

   They react to you the way the opening promises: they scatter in alarm, hide, bluff and occasionally try their luck. The tone is lightly absurd, so they're cartoon creatures with ragdoll physics that go down in puffs of fur and feathers, never anything grisly.

6. Feedback, not a score

   The after-action report and the front page

   

   Every operation closes with an after-action report written with total military seriousness: units deployed, rounds fired, hectares of forest reshaped, culprits accounted for. The numbers are there to be laughed at, not judged against.

   Then the town that wrote in gets its say, as a newspaper front page celebrating the operation like a war won. The front pages pile up on the operations room wall: the game's living history, and the clearest picture of how far out of proportion the whole country has gone.

Trivia

The opening described in the lore is in the design notes as a full shot list, camera angles included, written to be rendered as a trailer with an AI video model. The notes also mark which shots could be skipped in favor of fading straight to the title.

The notes weigh two ways to build it: a 2D top-down shooter with light strategy, or a 3D shooter in the style of Battlefield 2. They pick 3D, because it shows off how small a wolf looks next to a tank.