A very sad near-complete waste of potential. Should have been great. Comes close to being great. Ends up mediocre and frustrating.

So, you think this is a god game, right? Well, not so much. It's more of a puzzle game. The gameplay is based on villages that can use a few tiles around them, and you have to use your giants to put resources on those tiles and improve them. Pretty much all the resources have interaction bonuses, so you have to place the right combination of resources in the right order so as to get maximum progress for a village. It's not as fun as it sounds.

The first annoyance is that there's no in-game guide to what the upgraded resources do. You can see what the current level's possible upgrades can do, but for the levels after that, you have to alt-tab into the wiki. And since different level resources have wildly varying effects, this is important. The same applies for placing a basic resource - what you get depends on the terrain, but there's no tooltip for it, so either you have to memorize it or alt-tab into the wiki. Or just place something to find out. But that's not a good idea, because the giants' abilities are on cooldowns.

And speaking of cooldowns, you'll be annoyed at those a lot. See, you can't just freely place resources to solve the maximum efficiency puzzle. No, there's a cooldown on the resource-placing ability, and a cooldown on the upgrade-boosting ability. The latter is very important, because without it there's a 67% chance of getting the bad version of the "aspect" that you need to place in a resource to upgrade it. And you'll be dealing with this multiple times, because the game goes something like this:

- Place initial basic resources
- Complete projects for villages to get more powers for your giants
- Use those powers to upgrade the resources
- Rearrange resources because higher level resources have different combination effects
- Use resources to complete more projects for villages
- Get second level resource planting abilities
- Re-plant, re-boost, re-imbue and re-upgrade EVERYTHING!
- Use resources to complete MORE projects for villages
- Get second level "aspect"-imbuing abilities
- Re-plant, re-boost, re-imbue and re-upgrade EVERYTHING!
- Dunno what's next. I got too bored to continue. According to the wiki, there's a third level to the abilities, so extrapolate that into more re-doing everything.

Add to that the fact that village projects take up tiles and wipe whatever you had placed there upon spawning, casuing you to potentially have to rearrange everything in the area, and you get a lot of frustration.

Now, all this on its own wouldn't be too terrible. What makes it inexcusable is that the main game mode has an arbitrary time limit. A limit of 30, 60 or 120 minutes, your choice. After you unlock the longer options, of course.

Yes. You read that right. A god game, a management strategy game, has an arbitrary time limit before it wipes your progress and you get to start the next session on a barren planet. I'm not joking.

It doesn't need to be said that one of the major appeals of this type of game is the opportunity to craft a working city/region/ecosystem/whatever and have it sitting there for you to admire. This game goes in the opposite direction. You get a short time frame to set up a few villages before the session ends and reports what achievements you've gotten and what upgrades they've unlocked. Then you start over, using the upgrades to get more achievements.

There exists a free play mode, but it feels hollow, as you're locked out of the progression system. And you'd have to cheat first to get the unlocks, because free play only lets you use what you've unlocked in time-limited mode.

Another thing that needs to be mentioned is how disappointingly simplistic the humans are. The store page description promises virtues and vices, and your giants praising and punishing them. In reality, a Greed stat is all there is. It goes up when the village still hasn't begun using all the resources you've made available, and it goes down when the village catches up. That's it. It's a pretty transparent way to implement an arbitrary limit on the speed of village growth, and this in a game with arbitrary time limits on game sessions. I don't get it.

A predictable aggression mechanic is shoehorned in - at about half greed, the village will start attacking other villages, and at full greed it will start attacking your giants. If the latter happens, you have to destroy 3 armies and it will become peaceful and go down to 0 greed. This mechanic tends to be quite annoying, because there are achievements (and associated unlocks) tied to villages winning a number of wars, but they stop attacking other villages if they get too greedy (and turn on your giants), so you have to keep providing a surplus of one type of resource, waiting for the greed to go up until the village catches up, waiting for the greed to go down somewhat, then replacing the tiles with another type of resource, waiting for the greed to go up until the village catches up, etc.

All that said, the game is still close to being great. If it was based on unlimited play, with unlocks becoming available as they're achieved, not at the end of a session, and with village projects being built on the tiles already taken up by the village instead of on resource tiles, those 2 changes alone would be enough to turn me into a fan.

Gameplay aside, the game is at least quite visually appealing.

This was an interesting title to get into. I've clocked well over a hundred hours on the DRM free version, so I am speaking from more experience than I appear to be with this one.

A long long time ago I used to really love Populous for the Sega Genesis console. It was a really interesting isometric strategy game where randomly generated maps created a landscape over which I ruled as a god. I could foster my followers, or show no mercy and destroy with natural disasters.

Reus takes this a big step further.

Control elemental giants that can create and destroy, settle the world and watch villages grow and prosper, or destroy. There is a lot going on and this game can get really deep really fast. The tutorials made it easy to figure out the basics.

The game controls really well, and a simple stage can last for hours. Performing tasks such as evolving plant, mineral, or animal types unlocks different other plants, minerals, animals, and so on. This opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Managing villages is fun, and pretty simple at first. Inevitably they make tougher more complex demands. Which can grow tense as timers running for each task count down. I would liken it to spinning plates; try keeping too many going and you might lose track of of one or two of them and not realize you've missed something until it's too late. Other tasks might include fostering a great village only to see them become greedy and destructive toward others. And yet other tasks, or requests, could be sacrificing one village for another to meet shrine requirements.

There's not much I can tell you that you can't read elsewhere and better. I can tell you I enjoy this game immensely, and will probably clock another hundred hours on my steam copy as well. This game is a lot of fun, and a great way to chill for a few hours.

Pros:

• Crisp graphics
  
• Great sound and Music
  
• Easy to pick up, challenging to master
  
• Diverse possibilities add tremendous replay value
  
• Plethora of unlockables
  
• “Chill” experience
  
• Just plain fun!

Cons:

• Can be repetitive
  
• Some concepts a bit confusing
  
• Lack of custom controls menu
  
• Acquired taste (or not really for everyone)

Honestly, I had fun, but if someone had described this to me before I'd played it wouldn't have understood the game. It get's my recommendation though. I highly recommend looking at videos before buying! This game won't win everyone over, but as a former Populous fan, I'm hooked!

Really fun quick and small game. Perfect mini version of age of mythologies and other RTS's

So sad to not recommend this. But the thing is, it's just not fun to play.

When I saw the art and the idea and the trailers I was hooked. I thought it was brilliant. I got it and was even making plans to buy a copy for my 10yo niece so she'd have some fun and learn a bit about how nature works, how it interacts with humans, how symbiosis works, those kinds of things. Did I have too high expectations? Maybe.

When you get to the gameplay, problems start to arise. Let me try to list a few:

1) The planet is super small. As far as I could find there's only one size, that's it.

2) Then you go through the tutorials. Which is a nice thing of course. Except that you can't save. And the gameplay is a bit boring so I wanted to play for a few minutes, save, and come back later. Nope, can't do that. Gotta endure the whole thing at once.

3) There are three tutorials (eras). Every time you advance to a new one it starts from scratch. Oh, come on. I just spent some time building and caring for my planet and first thing you do is take it away from me and make me start again. And then again. And then again. Really?

4) My misunderstanding but I thought gameplay would be a bit more... natural and less calculative. Everything is numbers calculation, there doesn't seem to be any space for a more natural and organig development, for luck/chance, nothing. That's not how nature works! That kind of mechanics might cater for some but it's not for me.

5) The main gameplay seems to share that major flaw with the tutorials: You won't care for "your planet". Because you'll play for 30 min. and ditch it, then for 60 min. and ditch. What? :( I don't know but I love tycoon games and one of the things I like is how attached I grow to "my city", "my prison", "my civilization". In Reus you seem to be just starting over all the time.

Anyway. I could go on but these were the first/main things that struck me. To be honest I couldn't wait to just close the game and go play Banished or Prison Architect or Civ V or Cities: Skylines or any other game that may have a resemblance to this one. They are all just... better and more fun.


The art is beautiful and the idea is amazing but the gameplay falls short. It's repetitive, boring, calculative, and just not engaging or entertaining enough. A real shame as my expectations were high and I really wanted to like it so much.

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!

Goats and amethysts.

No.

Blueberries and frogs.

No?

What do you little bobbleheads want from me?

Reus is a resource management god-sim that has you taking on the role of the planet itself, controlling four powerful giants that carry out your will and alter the landscape to your whim. You can create trees and animal life, grow entire plots of fertile swampland, and one of your giants can even punch veins of precious stones directly into the crust.

All of this, to attract the ungrateful little bobbleheads known as man to build great cities upon your surface. The humans create many great works on their own- well, with your help. Your giants can directly influence whether or not they complete their projects (do you really want a mad scientist around? How about a sacrificial altar?) by altering the landscape further, creating new resources that meet the goals of these projects. The more you complete, the more varying projects and resources you unlock, and thus the rabbit hole goes deeper. You can even unlock longer game-times as well, allowing more time to create and build, and allowing more time for the humans to try and rise up against you and your giants.

They do go to war with each other. And they'll attack your god titans too, which is a curious choice. Your giants can slaughter them back, as any good vengeful potential goddess will be happy to know.

The game can get quite complicated as you go on, however, the title screen provides a link to the Reus wiki, which will give a lot of ideas and help.

The graphics themselves are cartoony and relatively simple looking, but always bright and interesting to look at. The game is on a 2D scale, all around the surface of the planet. Your giants traverse the outside of the planet as well, so some of your time will be spent waiting for the big lugs to get to where they're going, but since their abilities have cool-down meters, that isn't too much of a problem. The soundtrack is rather limited, though, so have some of your own music handy for the longer games.

Overall, Reus is a well-designed god game. It'll start off just slow enough to get you hooked, and keep you in for the long haul as you look to see what you can accomplish next.

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.

To sum Reus up in a few lines:

1 - You start off with a clean world, create habitats and life. Nice!
2 - People start settling, you grant those people what they need. Noone is complaining!
3 - Everyone is happy and loves you. This should be easy now...
4 - Different peoples start to have different objectives. Tough, but doable.
5 - Villages start to attack each other. Hey, stop that!
6 - A massive avalanche of goals and deadlines start to overcome you and
7 - OH GOD WHY THE HELL DO YOU GUYS KEEP ATTACKING THOSE HALF-WITTED FISHERMEN WHO THE HECK TAUGHT YOU THIS BULLSH*T AND WHY IS THAT GUY NOT RESPONDING TO
8 - You start off with a clean world...

(Full review follows below)

• Game Name: Reus
  
• Original Release: 2013
  
• Genre Tags: God Game; Strategy; Simulation; Casual
  
• My Overall Grade: B+
  
• Estimated Playtime (Campaign): 10-30 hours
  
• Multiplayer Aspect: None
  
• Recommended To: Established fans of the genre; Those intrigued by the genre; Novelty seekers; Casual gamers

There are several reasons why I really enjoy Reus and believe it to be a well-made and fun game. I can certainly see why it may not appeal to absolutely everyone, but I think it does what it does well and does so in a charming little way that remains unique to its own identity.

It is a casual game, and a very much toned-down “civilization-management” style game compared to others in that genre. It is actually a “god-sim” style game where you influence but do not control the civilizations in your world. Furthermore, it is round based, each round starting from scratch and lasting 1 to 2 hours; however unlocks and certain progressions are saved across all rounds.

The main thing that I like about Reus is that it satisfies the desire to play a civilization-management / god-sim style game without overloading the player with piles upon piles of data to keep track of. The tutorial is great, and slowly introduces the mechanics to the game. Even after the tutorial ends, things in the game are unlocked relatively slowly as the player completes rounds of gameplay. All this prevents you from feeling overwhelmed when you start playing. And you can really understand how the game works piece by piece instead of it all just being tossed in your face immediately after clicking “New Game.” It is a bit of a double-edged blade, however, as some players may inevitably find Reus to be lacking, as it is truly far less complex than many other games involving civilization-management.

The game is quite simplistic and it is way more god-sim than it is civilization-management; and it shows in the gameplay. Control is limited and simple, and much of the development is automated while the player just makes sure everything is going smoothly by managing resources, and occasionally divinely-intervening in affairs of the NPC civilizations.

The art style, music, and even the game mechanics all add to the simple charm of the game that gives Reus its positive identity. The game isn’t very innovative but it does have a unique feel that will satisfy. Once you get into the swing of things, you will find Reus to be quite addictive.

In summary, I would say that hardcore fans of the civilization-management genre will probably find Reus way too casual. In truth it is much more so a casual god-sim than it is anything else. But for people who are interested in getting a small taste of civilization-management without the overwhelming feeling and tedious gameplay, they may be pleasantly surprised at what Reus has to offer.

Follow my curation page to see more of my recommendations!

"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!

Update (October 29, 2013, 40+ hours): This game is now officially one of my favorite games ever! It has a nearly perfect balance - it's complex and deep, so you don't get bored too soon, yet it's relatively easy to get into and learn, so there's no need to spend too much time learning the game and its mecahnics - it's fun straight from the beggining!

I'd say this game is a perfect introduction to the colony management genre, much more begginer-friendly than Civilization 5, for example, which is an awesome game, possibly my #1 favorite of all time, but has a pretty steep learning curve.

I really hope Reus generates enough profit and PR buzz to justify a sequel. I'd hate for such a great game to stay a lone shining gem, all by itself. :)