You should play Reus. - It will give you a barren planet and 4 Giants which are able to create life on it. With their help you will create different biomes, plants, animals and ressources. Attracted by this, Humans will settle and build Villages, which you can then grow and care for.

The game is presented in its unique and suprisingly detailed visuals that let you zoom from the planet view in to the details of the villagers. Its something to experience, and makes navigating the whole planet fast, very easy.

The playtime is at first limited to 30 minutes, you have to play and unlock achievements to expand this to 60 and later 120 minutes. Yes the gameplay is heavily driven by achievements, but through this you are able to learn to effectively play the game. If they would have just ulocked everything from the start i would have been overwhelmed and confused. There is also an endless mode and various special gameplay options that you can play with if the standard gameplay isnt your thing.

The gameplay gets more and more complex the further you advance in the game, up to an suprising ammount of deepness that rivals the god-game-richness of classics like civilistaion or populus. The wiki helps alot to understand all the mechanics if youre lost: http://wiki.reusgame.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Overall this is a very solid and fun game, that will give you way more than you probably expected from it. - You should play Reus!

Reus is another indie title. If you’ve seen my play history you’ll know that I’m very “in to” the game. Reus is a good game to buy because it’s a world builder, individual games are short, there’s a lot of replayability, it’s a game with deep strategy, and an easy learning curve. There’s a lot of value in this game.

As a world building “god game” it fulfills many of the things you’d naturally expect. You lay out the terrain. You manage where the towns go. You can destroy nations in an instant. You manage a lot of externalities. The cool part about this “god game” is you manage every thing with these potent giants who you enhance throughout the game by completing objectives. Each giant is different and has unique powers to explore. A mountain giant for example can create minerals but can’t create animals. An ocean giant can enhance plants but can’t create them.

This game follows the old school principle of “unlocking content”. There’s just some thing about unlocking content and learning as you play that is a lot of fun. In Reus the entire objective is to march through over 60 unlocks which are called projects. Each time you play a game you complete various projects with differing objectives. This gives the game a lot of replayability as many of the projects have opposed goals and there’s not enough time in a 2 hour game to get them all. When you finish a game you’re rewarded with new tools for your next game. This means you’re slowly learning new and more advanced ways to adjust things as you progress, it’s all very elegantly done.

I have two negative things to say about Reus. First if you play a lot the music track is just simply not sufficient. The second is that even though so much of the game is modular there’s no DLC, no update packs, no nothing. They won’t even take my money for in game hats (for the giants of course).

This game is absolutely worth the $9.99. Skip pizza and destroy nations in an instant.

"Hmmm... another city / colony / civilization management simulator..." - this was the first thought about Reus. Well, that thought turned out to be wrong.

While the game might look simplistic, childish or even shallow, because of the colorful visuals and the concept of giants ruling the world, I promise you - this is not the case. Being a Civilization series veteran, I'm used to deep and complex games. While Reus might not compare with Civilization 5 or other games on that subject, it definitely provides a sophisticated enough mechanism to keep me interested, at least so far. I've been playing for 4-5 hours by now, and I feel like I still have a long way to go before I really learn the game mechanics and master it.

To bottom line this - if you like the genre, get this game. It's well worth it, even at full price ($10).

Update (18 hours total) - this game turned out to be one hell of a pleasant surprise! I'm having a lot of fun with the progression mechanism.

I now have a much better perspective and understanding of the game, so I can give much more information. Skip to the end for a short bottom line, if you don't feel like reading all that text.

The idea in the game is to contribute to the developement of the colonies by supplying resources and improvements, mainly plants, animals and minerals of different sorts. But in order to unlock the better, more advanced resources and improvements (called "aspects" ingame), you must explore and use the more basic options, or you can't progress and reach the advanced stuff. Needless to say, I guess, that the more advanced your giants are, the bigger and more prosperous colonies they can sustain, support and control. ...yes, control. Sometimes a colony gets greedy and arrogant and attacks your giants, and needs a good kick in the ♥♥♥. In some cases it's even necessary to destroy a colony, if it looks hopeless.

Also, the humans in the colonies will try and develope projects of different sorts, and you're supposed to help them meet the required criteria (if you want that project to succeed). The trick is to choose the optimal combination of resources to supply to the colony, factoring in the resource's position, its level, and the level of synergy it might or might not have with other resources nearby, plus the project's criteria, of course. So far, most projects need specific amounts of either food, wealth or technology or any combination of them. Some projects, though, will also require one or more unusual conditions, such as winning a war with another colony or having another colony completely destroyed (either by going to war or by "divine intervention").

There are more aspects to the game, some of which I don't fully understand myself yet, but I promise to update if I feel l learn something important enough. For one, you have time limits, both for the "Era" type of game (what I've been playing so far) and for the projects. Obviously, it complicates things.

Anyway, to summarize this update - this game is way more complex and rewarding than it seems, or at least more than it seemed to me at first. If you like strategy and colony management, get it, definitely worth it!

Saw this during the Steam Sale and said "WTF is this." Rolled the dice and was massively impressed. Basically, you play the part of the planet. You're totally barren and unable to sustain life. You control 4 different giants who all have different abilities. Your goal is to make the world liveable and grow the cities as big as you can (racking up the city and world score). Every city will produce a semi random special work with certain requirements. Upon completion, you get an ambassador to upgrade your giants skills/unlock new abilities. This is the real key to the game as higher level project require much more resources which cannot be obtained without upgrading resources (which start out locked and are unlocked by completing various achievements).

The challenge kicks in late in the game from the greed mechanic. When a city has more than 20 of any unused resource (threshold can be raised/lowered by various things like projects, awe, and danger) they gain greed. Too much greed and they'll start attacking other cities and even your giants. Late game they will start work on projects that give cities up to 500 unused resources (bigger gap faster greed accumulation). Losing a city can massively set back your score and cost you valuable achievements. The game is a balancing act of managing multiple cities and their needs while striving for ambassadors without letting the humans kill each other.

My one complaint comes from the 2 hour game mode (needed to unlock a lot of the high end achievements/resources). If you're really striving for absurd scores to get the best resources unlocked quickly, you spend a ton of time pausing and issuing orders to ensure you're maximizing building in the time limit. I honestly found 2 hour games far less fun than the 30 & 60 min game modes.


TL;DR - Simple idea, complex planning. Kind of a mix of a god game and a puzzler. Need to have a plan to "level" your giants and build the world to maximize your score. Very good game.

Best game i've never heard of before buying.

A charming and addictive god-game, has a lot of depth beneath its simple gameplay. Game times are divided into 30/60/120 minute segments, each with their own achievements to unlock. Achievements actually do something in this game, each comes with a resource that you can use in-game after unlocking and actually makes for some very addictive gameplay hunting down the achievements.

Has a lot more potential as well, sadly updates are rather sparse. Hoping for a sequel.