Terra Nil

This game has an interesting concept that I found interesting when it came out. Most strategy building games have you dealing with the negative effects of pollution and mass expansion as a tacked on after thought that you deal with only after hours/days of investment on one map. Terra Nil makes it your initial goal right away to return the map to a more pristine state. It's a wonderful concept and I have been playing this since the first versions came out. The reason I mention this fact is because while the game is amazing right out of the gate, some additions have been made that have caused it to be unplayable. A lot of games have bugs. It's a given when it comes to these sorts of games but fortunately, the developers are quick to employ hotfixes where other games will let it stew for years untouched. When animals were initially added to the game, there were bugs where some didn't appear in their proper habitat, would disappear all together, bugged once you moved them remotely, etc. At one point, I had a bug where my ship flew off the screen but the menu to leave never popped up. Again, these bugs were all addressed and handled so by making this review I hope they acknowledge the additions they've made in this new update and roll back or make some changes. My breaking point has arrived in the form of photo mode and I've now had to make the decision to full uninstall the game. Not sure if it'll be worth returning for especially after frustration building up. I cannot leave my map even when it is completed because I have to take a gold star picture of the various animals that have returned to the environment that you have built for them. This photo mode was added as sort of a "take pride in your work and revel in it". That's why at the completion of each level, you can view your map and look at all the animals that have returned. Bears are walking through the trees, swans are flying by, frogs are chilling in the pond, etc. That's what I initially thought photo mode would be. Another addition for those who are vane enough to go for a 100% run of their game. But photo mode is not an sidequest, it is a required addition to leave. I thought the first few times it was a bug and restarted at checkpoints but now I'm realising that I'll never be able to 100% this game due to the photo mode keeping me from leaving. At one point, it asked me to take a picture of an animal that does not spawn on the map I am on. Another point, I took a picture of a boar dozens of times and it refused to give me a star for that. Honestly respect to the devs for pulling me back in after months of not playing. I saw the update and wanted to give it a whirl again. But all my happy memories are now left with a bitter aftertaste as the past few hours have been spend meticulously rebuilding nature, carefully placing each animal, making sure they are all content and then being unable to take any photos to leave the map. Restart check point, bump into same issue, restart map, missing 1 god star photo, rinse and repeat.

The game isn't terrible, but it's not great either. If it were longer I'd probably recommend it with caveats, but for the price that game is incredibly short. I have 100%ed the game. I have roughly 12 hours of play time and a good chunk of that was when I left the game idle accidentally. It feels incomplete. You have 16 total maps, but huge parts of the planet are just missing, and it makes it feel weirdly empty. The screenshot they show of the planet map in the marketing materials really wants you to think there's more maps all over the globe. There aren't. You can see almost all the maps available, save the 3 new ones that came out in the heatwave update, 16 in total. And that's the entire game. Some features (the drone) are introduced and used in only in a limited selection of maps. This sort of thing is fine for a game like Planet Zoo or cities skylines, where you have a career mode meant to teach you the game and provide a bit of structure, but the core game is a sandbox. But it's very disappointing in game that absolutely is not a sandbox or a city builder. The game has strict, linear goals. It's a puzzle/resource management game where the goal is to solve the puzzles, and it gives you a grand total of 16. There is no sandbox mode or even random challenges I could find. The game also has issues with lagging and memory leaks, which is honestly inexcusable for a game that's been out this long and with such a simple concept. The core gameplay loop isn't terrible, but it's scattered. I think the heatwave update negatively impacted this by adding on seemingly random photo goals. For some reason, the goal is not to actually make all the animals happy and ensure their environment is survivalable. Rather, you need to take a photo of one specific animal happy and then you've checked the goal off your list. After that, you can literally relocate all the animals to a lava hellscape, wreck the restored landscape, and leave, and as long as you took that photo of the animal happy that's all the game cares about. It's incredibly strange and doesn't fit with the rest of the game. I can only assume they did it this way, because it can be literally impossible to make all animals happy on some maps, depending on what layout you got at the start, and how you had to set up your biomes. It's still very strange and I'm not a fan. To top it all off, the game seems to completely lack any sort of story or personalized character to it. They don't even bother with some very basic worldbuilding. It really does feel empty. At some point I'm launching a rocket into space, but I don't know why, I don't know who I'm even supposed to be. In a sandbox game that's not a problem, but in this game which is absolutely not a sandbox, it kind of is. A little bit of story work could've gone a long way here. I'm sad because I've literally spent longer playing the little prototype version then I did this game. I went into this hoping for a good experience, and got let down. And I do like a lot of the messaging of this game. I'm someone whose done wildlife restoration and it's cool to see a game about that. I just wish it were good so I could recommend it to other people.

I loved the base game and if I could somehow cut-out some of the new "features" to go back to the basics, I would. If I had a stressful day at work I could come home and play this to help decompress. Great audio, pleasant gameplay, overall great time. Basically, this was the game I played when I didn't want to deal with stress. But, someone decided to make the photo-mode mandatory to complete each of the missions. So now I'm stressing about each little animal's sliders not being perfectly optimized and not being "fast enough" to meet their needs. Take the snow owls for instance, by the time I managed to grow enough forest for them (despite the random weather slowing me down), the snow owls had gotten so "upset" that they flew off to another part of the map. We also need a pause button or a weather forecast. Somehow even though the game has all this terraforming tech it doesn't have a weather forecast system? Imagine: you spend the last few clicks setting rocks into the right spots, purifying the land, growing grass, and then burning the grass so you can use the turn that into a forest....and then it starts to rain and you have to start from scratch because all the undo button only goes back 1 action. This game is no longer low-stress.

Too frustrating for a relaxing game. Remove the photo conditions — this mechanic just doesn’t work.

TLDR: This is a strange game. On one hand, it's not challenging. But, on the other, it's not relaxing either. So, its sits in a strange void where it is not the game for you to relax nor to test yourself. It is somewhat cute, though. But that's it. Longer explanation: The game has only one resource and it is pretty easy to come by. In the first part of each stage, it is indeed a limit. You have to pace yourself so as not run out of it, but it isn't hard to keep track. However, on the second and third stages, there's absolutely no way to run out of it. So, basically, for two thirds of each stage, you are in god mode. But each building has an imposed requirement that is utterly arbitrary and the game doesn't really bother to explain or show during the game. So you have to learn by trial and error. Not to mention minimum and maximum distances that are quite bothersome for a game that tries to be chill, but not well shown for a game that tries to be challenging. So you end there just slightly miffed most of the time, having to redo stuff a few times till you get it done the way you wanted. And let me not get into the recicling boats. They are incredibly aggravating. In the end of each stage, the game wants you to take pictures of the animals. And if there's anything on the way, the creature does not show but it still counts. So you get pictures that the game says are awesome due to all the different animals in it, but all you see are the trees covering the animals. It is quite silly. Summing up, I feel that the game doesn't really make up its mind on whether to be a serious game or a fun activity and it ends up being neither.

I first tried this game way back in beta, when it still had pixel graphics. I fell in love with the idea: cleanse and restore a barren and polluted planet to restore the flora and fauna there. And for the 1.0 release, that's exactly what I got. However, in one of the more recent updates, the devs inexplicably decided to change this successful formula, and added a bizarre mechanic, where you have to create ideal habitats for the wildlife, somehow trying to make the land perfect, and then snap a photo of them enjoying said habitat. Bear in mind, this takes place AFTER you've already done all the fun, terraforming stuff. You're just about to beat the level, and suddenly the game throws this weird cross between Zoo Tycoon and Pokemon Snap at you. Neither idea is even remotely fun. There are gameplay settings to alter the strictness of these elements, but there's no way to eliminate them. This has effectively changed a chill, satisfying game about restoring nature into this tedious, unfun habitat builder of some sort. And bear in mind, you can't simply take a tool and place a few more squares of water, or just plant a few more trees. The tools in this game are deliberately imprecise: that's the challenge and the strategy. You have to think ahead and plan out where to place each building to extract as much value as possible, and restore the entire landscape. With this new mechanic, they've taken imprecise tools, and asked the player to perform VERY precise actions, such as "this bear wants more water" or "this wolf doesn't have enough food". It's completely counter-intuitive, and I have absolutely no idea why the devs thought this was a good idea. To me, this has completely ruined the chill, satisfying nature of the game and turned it into something that feels like it belongs in a different game entirely. Devs, please give us a way to disable this feature entirely. You have alienated the players who fell in love with what this game used to be. I can't recommend this game as it currently stands, unless this feature can be disabled, and this game can be enjoyed the way it was originally designed.

They ruined it! This was an awesome game, but the latest update makes it basically unplayable for me. I play games like this to relax when I'm exhausted, with the difficulty turned off. But you can't turn off the new requirements for the photos, and they're difficult! So I guess they decided it's for "gamers only" or something.

The stupid puzzlework with the animal pictures at the end of each map totally kills this game for me, wish i would have saw this **** before i bought it. Sadly, i bought it in a not-on-steam sale, so refund for me. Such an unnecessary annoyance in an otherwise nice game.