Reus

[apocrypha]

Reus.

Anyone picked this up now that it's gone live on Steam?

It's a 2-D side-scrolling god game. You have 4 gods (ocean, rock, forest, swamp) and use their various abilities to change the terrain and place animals, minerals and plants. These all have interactions with each other and can be morphed into different things which then have different interactions. You create habitable terrain, villages then spontaneously develop and start to build projects, e.g. a school or a granary, which require food/wealth/tech to complete, which are in turn provided by the various resources and synergies that your gods create.

Played it briefly today, did the tutorials and a single 30 min Era game. Seems quite fun - mostly going to be a game about learning which combinations of animals/plants/minerals produce which resources the most efficiently. Personally I would have preferred a full 3-D world rather than the 2-D slice you get, but then it would have been a different game. It feels like it should have been a tablet game rather than a PC one. At the very least it'll make a good Android/iOS port at some point I suspect.

Oh and the performance is terrible for some reason. Things started getting choppy and jerky for me when I had 2 villages! Given how simple the graphics are I don't think there's any excuse for that really, it's just badly optimised. Still, it's only cheap. But I suspect it won't be long before it's even cheaper.

[Yegolev]

I pooched my expectations by remembering ActRaiser.

Fuck, I'm old.

[Shannow]

Marco?

[Sky]

I was looking at it but passed. The better comments said it was more of a puzzle game than a god game or sim.

[Yegolev]

Well, let's remember that this is, in fact, 2013.

[Ard]

I got it, and for the price, I have zero regrets.  I'm only up to the point where I've finished the tutorials though, but so far I find it an interesting enough time waster, although it's more a resources management game than the god game they bill it as.

[Tarami]

I got this today.

I agree with the puzzle sentiments. I've only played for about an hour (including tutorials) and sadly I'm already bored. Yes, that might seem like ADD on my part, but at the same time there's not much to do in the game. You use your giants to put down different types of resource plots and depending which ones neighbour they yield certain amounts of various resource points. There are enhancements to apply to the plots, which allows you to upgrade them which in turn changes the plot synergies. Repeat for a while and try to remember the undocumented upgrade trees.

It all sounds sort of cool in theory, but in practice the available plot spaces per town feel too few and everything feels cramped. There's no room to play. Also, as far as I can tell, there's no way to undo any plot assignments without razing the entire town. You don't even get to build one massive city but have to spread your attention across many.

The villagers mostly loiter about the town centre, being unoffensive. The giants, the avatars of gods, don't really add anything significant. They boil down to a hotbar of fairly arbitrarily selected abilities each and since they have to walk, SLOWLY, to the plot on which they're to act, as game prolongers. Top this off with lengthy cooldowns (1 minute) on many abilities. Had the giants not had to move all over the map and had there been a way to undo actions, games would be a third their current length.

Graphics are acceptable, but they aren't really graphics that seem to belong on a PC. They aren't particularly informative or particularly attractive. They look on-par with a well-made Flash game.

Fundamentally though it's themed as something it's not. It's not Populous, Black & White or From Dust, eventhough it clearly has been inspired by them. Its aspirations to being a god game end with its theme. I feel they've taken the infidel-stomping fun out of those games and replaced it with dry arithmetics. This is not a game which you will play to get satisfyingly powertrippy and crush your enemies. It doesn't even really have any goal except the equivalent of kill ten rats. (Build one town! Build two! Build three and amass this many this thingies!)

I keep mentioning things it is not like, which is because it is, for good and bad, fairly unique. I hope I've managed to give a picture of what's it like to play, none the less.


If-this-were-a-BiiF-verdict: A dry numbers game that has been given a lusher appearance than is usual. Rent/try if you like resource optimization, avoid if you are looking for a proper sandbox/god game variant.

[bhodi]

I picked this up today.

It's really an alchemy, puzzle and micromanagement efficiency game. It's not a god game at all. It was worth my $8. The way the game makes you unlock things gradually by starting over and getting a bit farther each time is a nice touch, it soothes the OCD I get about everything being cramped and wanting to level everything to squeeze out a bit more returns, because I know I can just try again in 20 minutes or whatever.

[Reborne]

I've had some fun with this.
Have played around 4 half hour games and have unlocked the hour long games.

Very much agree with the previous posts that this is a puzzle game inspired by god games and that it would probably be better targeted at tablet gamers than PC as it is fun to mess around with rather than get invested in.

Some things of note:

You can replace things that you've put down, just place a new thing over an old thing and the old thing is gone.

Towns expand based on having enough resources and time, so you can play a one town game and see if you can get it to take over as much of the world as possible.