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Reus
PC (Steam)
Achievement Whore: The Game
2.5/5 stars
“Reus” was not originally a game that was on my radar. However, when it was featured for almost-free during a Steam sale not all that long ago, I went ahead and impulse bought it, thinking it would be nice to try a newer 2D god-sim, since the last one I actually enjoyed was the sim portion of “ActRaiser” waaay back on the SNES. Unfortunately, in not doing my research into the game and judging the proverbial book by its colorful and charming 2D cover, I ended up with a major dud on my hands.
Presentation
The presentation is definitely the high point in “Reus.” The entire game is a flat, 2D experience make from layered imagery. Honestly, it’s not very impressive technically, as it ultimately looks like a Flash game. However, “Reus” looks like a Flash game with incredibly good art direction and a talented design staff. The audio is nice as well, though not nearly as striking as the visuals.
The only snag in “Reus’” presentation (aside from numerous reported glitches that I, thankfully, didn’t encounter, is the fact that nothing in the game scales properly at high resolutions. Playing the game at my TV’s native resolution of 1080p makes it nearly impossible to read the plethora of on-screen text due to the font becoming microscopic. I ended up being forced to play the game at a much lower resolution just so I could actually see what was going on and read the text.
Story
“Reus” begins with the unorthodox take of placing the player into the role of a living planet. This planet spends significant amounts of its time sleeping, only to awaken and discover its surface barren. Summoning four elemental-themed giants to enact its will, the planet terraforms its surface and builds a hospitable environment for humans (which apparently spontaneously generate outside of the planet’s direct control) before going back to sleep and letting everything fall apart.
This small amount of narrative backstory is told through “Reus’” three tutorial stages. Unfortunately, that is ALL of the story in “Reus,” which makes playing the ‘main’ portion of the game feel excessively boring in addition to the repetitiveness of its gameplay.
Gameplay
The living planet in “Reus” is represented by a flat circle with the four elemental giants – Ocean, Forest, Mountain, and Swamp – living on the outside surface. The player can pan and zoom the camera around the full circle of the planet easily enough while simultaneously commanding the giants to use their powers to terraform the surface. Each giant has a specialty, with the Ocean Giant creating bodies of water which allow the Forest Giant and Swamp Giant to create their forest and swamps nearby, and the Mountain Giant creating mountains that automatically become surrounded by deserts. Each of these environmental changes covers a set number of ‘patches’ on the surface of the planet, with each patch having its own stats and potential.
The core of the gameplay in “Reus” involves using the giants to place and upgrade animals, plants, or minerals on patches of land within the spontaneously-occurring human settlements in order to increase the humans’ prosperity. As human villages prosper, they begin to expand their borders and the humans start working on ‘projects,’ which require the player to build-up certain quantities of food, wealth, and/or technology inside the village’s borders within a set period of time. Completing a project for a village causes that village to send an Ambassador to live with one of the giants (player’s choice). The different types of Ambassador unlock different additional abilities for their chosen giant.
This core gameplay in “Reus” would actually be fairly interesting if it was actually used to do anything with in a structured campaign mode. Instead, upon completing the tutorials, the player is simply given the ability to play 30-minute games (with options for 60- and 120-minute games as unlockables) and attempt to unlock Achievements, which in-turn unlock additional upgrades for the different types of patches, which in turn make it easier to gain higher quantities of prosperity in a given session. In essence, “Reus” is nothing but an Achievement hunt in time-trial form.
Even more damning, “Reus” is the type of convoluted game that actually has a link to its Wiki page (which was down at the time I was playing the game) on the title screen. Access to outside information is, naturally, required because the ways the different patches interact with each other is fairly complex, with each patch type possessing a ‘synergy’ that makes it more productive if wildly varying conditions are met. Of course, the Wiki would be significantly less necessary if the game simply informed the player what exact type of plant/animal/mineral they will get from their selected giant on their selected patch type, but the game simply doesn’t do that.
Overall
While it looks like a charming and friendly entry in the god-sim sub-genre, “Reus” is actually just a repetitive cycle of time trials leading to Achievements leading to longer time trials leading to more Achievements. While the ability to unlock new goodies within the game itself grants at least some sense of progress and permanency, the complete lack of an engaging campaign mode left me tired of the game in short order. The team that worked on “Reus” managed to create a novel engine for a game, then never did anything interesting with it.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 1/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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