Osta Evopollution

First of you think this is somekind of strategy/simulation game. But it's nothing like that at all. I'm happy that I got this game for free and don't wasted any money on this.

===PRO================
-looks very cute with its 16bit graphics

===CON================
-no real challnge (instead of building oil, gas or nuclear buildings you can simply build solar or wind energy with no pollution and therefore no penalty)
-this is a waiting simulator
-no tutorial (still coudln figure out some buildings)
-no explanation on how pollution or purification works
-no indicators at the GUI for pollution/purification level
-only one music track wich loops over and over again
-illogical (You need to pay fees to maintain trees, oil is the least polluting resource while gas has medium pollution and a nuclear power has extreme pollution)

Unfortunately unfinished. What seems like a misguided attempt to lecture the general public on how great solar and wind power are turns out to be merely misunderstood. Still, there is no real gameplay here besides waiting it out while you are either being shelled by the Dark Energies of the Pollution Planet, with meteors and space worms destroying your buildings, or choosing not to produce any pollution and then waiting it out while nothing whatsoever happens. After the unannounced goal of hoarding up 1 million snazzy space credits is reached (presumably to claim a flight ticket to a place not beset by space worms?), the game ends and you get told how jolly you were. In my case it was an E, as I just tabbed away and did something else after building a few wind turbines and solar plants.

Only consider this if the developer returns to make it a real game.

[For the lazy ones: Skip the text for pros and cons.]

Well, this game really looked interesting to me so I bought it. Unfortunately it's not quite as good as it looks. Why? Let's see.

You are thrown onto that map with a chosen ammount of money and you buy stuff to produce energy and earn money for you. Nice start.

Some of the buildings affect the pollution of the map, like gas plants or oil refineries and some don't, like solar panels. But clean energy takes forever to produce money. Does it even produce money? I get a little "3" on my oil drills to tell my something happens, but my clean energy just keeps looking fine... however.

If you earned too much pollution accidents start to happen, like lightning, meteors or a giant worm randomly popping out of the ground destroying everything in range. When any of these desasters destroy your building the pollution stops and... yes, that's it. You rebuild it, pollution starts again, and hello Mr. Worm!

You are able to clean the pollution by planting trees, but I was not able to see any difference so far. So I'm not sure how or whether these trees affect the pollution...

So in fact you could just build a lot of solar panels and hope you reach the goal. Oh, "what's the goal?" you might ask. Well, there's a little "?" in the top left corner to tell you: "To win you must make 1.000.000 Dollars". Oh my. And all that with a solar plant that... I don't know, does it work at all!?

Besides that the interface is minimalistic. Building menu, money and that nice little "?" top left. It would be great at least to know how much pollution my buildings produce just to plan how many trees I need to plant. But nope.

Next thing very annoying is the lacking possibility of erasing the enviroment. There are trees everywhere on the map, mostly in positions that block nice building grounds. And you have a wonderfull bulldozer-tool. But guess what? You cannot erase trees you did not plant by yourself. That's somehow nature-friendly, but come on... Don't cut my choices where I want my trees! At least they got different colors for map-trees and self-made-trees. Makes it easier to remember which ones to cut down...

What else? Graphics itself are really nice, I like this retro-Pokémon-look. On the other hand the music sucks. It's like a cat walking across a keyboard. With a lot of reverberation. And a bit of rhythm. Annoying to me. Well, at least you can turn the volume down from the options. That's one of three things you can do there. Sound and music volume and fullscreen-toggle. Wish there were at least some more graphics options. Or the scroll speed toggle. It's sooooo slow, jesus!

The last thing is the lack of progress in the game. Yes, you can unlock new buildings, but the world itself doesn't change (except when you have problems with leaking oil... :s ). Also it would be great if you could upgrade your buildings with better filters to produce less pollution, but that simply isn't possible. In fact you can't do much more than build things. This game is called EVOPOLLUTION, but all I get is POLLUTION, where's the EVO?

Guess that's it so far.

Pro:
- great idea
- many building possibilities
- making money. Who doesn't like making money?
- cute worm-monster
- nice retro graphics

Cons:
- repetitive
- hard on every setting
- no feedback on what you do (how does that tree affect my world?)
- no instructions
- always the same goal (reach 1.000.000 Dollars)
- cannot bulldoze any map enviroment (like trees, seriously?)
- annoying music
- no growth (besides the new buildings you unlock)
- would be somehow catchy, if it wasn't that hard ("Yai, I build a gas plant! ... Oh, the worm destroyed it..." YOU JUST CAN'T STOP THAT THING!)
- lack of options (sound and music volume and full screen on/off)
- incredibly slow scrolling

Conclusion:
I gave it a chance and it just didn't convince me. All in all it's a nice idea, but not much more than that. This game needs a lot more work to make it an enjoyable game you would play and also re-play. So far it's mostly frustrating. But maybe we get an update, that would be great!

Until now it's a no, I do not recommend that.

Right now, this game is not in a good state. (TL;DR at the end)

The aim of the game is to reach 1,000,000 credits, starting with a custom amount of credits, up to 25,000.
You can affect your weekly income by building different kind of power sources, including polluting types (oil, gas, etc) and pollution-free types (solar panels, wind turbines, etc) which all generate credits. Pollution shall be the main difficulty of the game:
If you build too many oil drills for example, your randomly generated world will suffer from pollution, causing e.g. lightning strikes that destroy your buildings. In order to fight pollution, you may chose to plant trees. Two types of them.
This balance system is however not transparent at all. You don't get to see, how much you pollute and how much your trees help, making it hard to find a proper distribution. The only feedback you get is when catastrophes are happening, nothing else.
The plantable trees are the only units that cost credits. And once again, you have no indicator showing how much you earn and how much you lose per week.

The biggest downside though is how damn easy it is to win this game, even on hard mode (not the expert mode, have not tried that one). If you don't want to be spoilered, don't read the following passage.
All you have to do is build wind turbines and power storages. That's it. They don't cause pollution and give you a steady income. You build them. Wait, build more, wait more, and - magic - you have 1,000,000 credits.

Basically, what this game needs is a downside to the pollution-free ressources, so that the difficulty lies in finding the correct balance between fossile fuels, 'green' ressources and vegetation, instead of just.... waiting.

Moreover, the whole game (featuring music, menu, interface) needs more love. It all seems too minimalistic. In the end, this game is, without further work, no fun.

I really hope that the creators will rework the game, i love the graphics and the general concept and idea of the game. There is potential. Unfortunately, it's still sleeping.

TL;DR: Game needs more love, gameplay way too easy, lacks transparency in terms of credits and pollution level making it unenjoyable. Not recommended.

Long Review, you have been warned!!!

For those that prefer to watch a video explaining stuff, here you go :- http://youtu.be/QpcvZWLUCMQ

So, this game looked pretty unique. We haven't come across many "business" management games that have a emphasis on the impact on the environment. The retro graphics style caught my eye, as did the fact It was also nice to see a game on steam that wasn't in early access or shovelware from the 1990s.

The game itself seems solid in theory, try to make money whilst maintaining the environment. If the land gets heavily polluted then weird stuff starts to happen, like meteors falling from the sky, or giant worms trying to destroy your precious buildings. The fact that there is random generation in the 5 maps you can choose from adds to the replayability (although the only thing I really noticed this have an impact on is the number and location of Oil Nodes).

First thing I noticed, there is no tutorial to explain how to actually play the game. There is a small "?" in the top left which you would assume would give you some kind of help or options, but instead it just tells you that you need to accumilate 1 million dollars to win.

The UI feels clunky, you can only scroll the screen with the mouse at a painfully slow speed. Good Luck finding the scroll speed on the options menu, all you get is music and sound sliders (oh sorry and full screen, can't forget that).

Perhaps my main gripe with the game at the moment is the lack of display information on the buildings and such. OK, yes you can see how much a building costs, how much weekly profit you get and it's (very vague by the way) pollution output, but how much does it cost to maintain? Is there maintenance costs? The system feels very basic.

It would also be nice to see some graphs of some sort. I'd like to see what my monthly profit (and expenditure) is, or how polluted the land is on average. This is the only business management game that I've come across that doesn't even have that basic functionality.

Considering the game is centered around the idea of keeping a clean enviroment why can't we upgrade our buildings to produce less pollution via installing (costly) filters and such?

Edit: So after playing for alittle bit longer I've found the game to mainly reward the playstyle of building nothing but buildings that cause no pollution. Apart from the fact that it takes alittle longer to reach the money goal there is no downsides to it. This seems flawed as it then gets extremely repetitive to just do the same set-up over and over again. That's rather disappointing.

Most of these problems could be patched. "If" it does, I'll happily re-review it, until then though I won't recommend it.

While the learning curve is low (and there is no tutorial), it doesn't take long to realize that if this game had a mechanic to speed up time, it wouldn't be a challenge at all. Yeah there are moments where you frantically try and fix the pollution problem but once you find the right balance, all that's left to do is afk for an hour or so, or stare at your screen as your wallet slowly fills up.

It's really frustrating how slow paced this game can be. Morever there's no sense of progress once you beat a level. Nothing new to unlock, no new buildings, just more of the same sitting and waiting and tweaking.

For the price I figured it couldn't be so bad that it'd be a complete waste of money, but unfortunately I was wrong. I made the mistake of looking at the images and description of the game and seeing perhaps a newer version of SimEarth or something similar, and as I love simulation games figured "what the heck".

Lesson learned, always scroll down to the reviews. Absolutely would have avoided this if I had, as everything that was pointed out in the first few I ran into almost immediately.

Oil rigs are the first things you build, in order to unlock oil tanks, then refineries, etc. You have to build one of each building to get to the next level, although solar farms appear to unlock but you can't actually build them (bug?) without perhaps building gas plants first (which I refuse to do based on the "VERY HIGH" level of pollution).

Oil rigs have a low level of pollution, yet within minutes the ground is brown and trees are dying, and even planting a medium tree or two (which more than take up the tiny amount of profit from the rig) makes no difference that I saw. Clearly something that's "VERY HIGH" or in the case of the nuclear plant "VERY VERY HIGH" would just obliterate my map in seconds, right?

The correct strategy is to build a number of cheap solar plants, then stack the rest of the map with power storage facilities. No roads, no trees, just stack them. This gives you the maximum amount of profit, and then Alt-Tab for 15 or 20 minutes and you win!

Clearly this is less a game and more of a propaganda piece, as no matter what you can't actually win by using polluting types of profit, since cost of trees offsets the profits and without that you get worms and meteors up your ♥♥♥.

I myself enjoy this game. I think the graphics are very clean and clear. If this game was rated with stars I would give it a 3.5, and here's why:

-(According to other reviews and posts) The game NEEDS a gauge showing the amount of pollution and the amount of purity. Personally, I think there should be a mode or a button to reveal that information; areas being affected by pollution, areas clear and 'healthy', etc. And these areas should be color coded to the effectiveness of the buildings and enviroment. (in this special "mode", it would be good to include the amount your buildings are making.)

-A lot of the gameplay is very inaccurate, for example the "Nuclear Plant". In a real life situation, nuclear plants are in favor of the enviroment, not against.

-More buildings would be GREAT! and the ability to technologically advance your tools, buildings, enviroment, and custom would be a smart decision. This would allow for a more diverse gameplay experience.

I do love the game but it is missing a lot. If the devs are still with us, please see what the community has to say. Thanks! :D

(I will turn my frown upside-down when I see improvement.)

There's more strategy in some free to play, browser-based "clicker" games out there. The music is chirpy and annoying for a game that requires long and considerate attention in a gaming session. Mechanics are interesting albeit shallow, also trees cost money over time to own, which is not intuitive and not obviously explained. There are 5 maps to play on, but you can plumb the depths of the gameplay on a play-through on the easiest settings of the first map, then proceed to the hardest settings on the last (mars) map and touch on everything there is to see while skipping the middle 3 maps.
TL;DR Not a waste of time, but not really worth it either.

This game is quite simply a total disappointment. I love tycoon/economy games, this is about 5 minutes of game play followed by aeons of not playing it with some mixed in regret and ultimately a feeling that I was conned out of dollars I could have had more fun flusing down a toilet.

Game is simple. Easy to tell what the devs political stances are. Nuclear power creates more pollution than oil and gas combined (under normal use). Trees cost a constant flow of cash for upkeep... Scored an F- but wasn't told why (time? because they hate teh idea of nuclear so much that they just straight up fail you if you use it? Some hidden goal that isn't ever stated?)... The devs have obviously not done any research into how physics works... or they were just trying tro make a game out of half the mechanics they should have used for a real game... Would not recommend. Wish I still had the $2.50 I spent on this.

Oh dear. Well this could have gone better.
Dont waste your money, all that happens is you place a few things down, go and have a sandwich and boom! You've won.
Honestly, save up for something better

Game is way too simple, might as well be a flash game on armor games or something.
Also not to mind its has no instructions or really any UI for that matter.

NOT WORTH ANY MONEY

if you want a game in this style just go to a flash game site for free.

Not really a game at all, and the heavy-handed messaging is just hilarious (a nuclear power station explodes if you try demolishing it!?).

Evopollution has a great concept, but it has terrible execution. In the game you produce energy by building things like oil wells, gas plants, solar panels, and windmills to make a profit. However if you allow your island to get too polluted, accidents happen and destroy your oil wells and gas plants. You can try to mitigate this pollution by planting trees, but since the game doesn't give you a solid number on how much pollution you are producing and how much each tree can counteract, it is nigh impossible to make a decent profit with anything but solar panels and windmills.

Another problem with the game is that once you have optimized everything to make the most profit possible, there is absolutely nothing left to do until you reach your goal of $1,000,000. When you reach this point, you can pretty much leave the game running and do something else until the goal has been reached.

Overall I would not recommend buying this game. It is not fun, it is not engaging, and it is not worth your time and money.

Pretty dull and very basic, wasn't worth paying for.

Very cute. But has an obvious winning strategy.
Ultimately not worth your money.

Overly simplistic game. There is some room for optimising, but generally it's just a waiting game...

Awful game. Less gameplay than cookie clicker 0/10 want a refund.

A very strange game. Not what I really would describe as a business stratergy game myself. Its more of a puzzle game. I did have fun trying to workout what I had to do and seeing how the game worked but I dont think its got lasting appeal.

It in my opinon seems slightly unfinished and could have been alot more should the actually buisness side of things been deeper.

Overall I enjoyed my time with it and would suggest its something to pick up during a steam sale certainly not worth more than a couple of pounds.