An otherworldly tutor
Sanchit Sharma struggles with taming his titans, in a Reus review
Ever wanted to build a boring wasteland of a planet into a thriving world? Or control giants that can influence the planet on a large scale? “Dammit, ocean giant, I said one space to the left!” Okay, command giants; they’re a bit imprecise. “Come back forest giant, I need you over here!” The silly things. Anyway, forget Black & White, four giants is much more fun than one creature that doesn’t even have complete control over the topography!
Reus is a god/puzzle game in which you must use your four giants (Swamp, Forest, Mountain and Ocean) to influence the ecosystem enough to create human life on your surface – since you’re the planet, for some reason. By helping the humans complete their projects you may impress them enough for them to send your giants ambassadors, which will increase their powers. However, you must be wary; if the humans get too greedy they may wage war against each other, or even start attacking your giants!
The gameplay is quite simple. The giants each have a major power which will change the landscape (creating whatever environment they are named after), and creating mountains and oceans influences the terrain to either side as well, influencing what type of settlement is formed and therefore what types of projects the settlement will try to undertake. In addition to this, each giant can place both objects (minerals, plants, animals) onto the surface and aspects onto objects.
Where things start getting more complicated is the interaction between these objects. Each object has one or more synergies which activate if a certain condition is met,which can lead to situations where simple objects produce more resources than more advanced ones. Successfully taking advantage of these synergies is the key to unlocking the more difficult projects.
The overall goal of the game is to unlock all the achievements. It is played out in games ranging from half an hour to two hours long (you can, of course, pause or save at any time) in which you try to develop humans in the right way to unlock the remaining achievements, thus allowing humans to try harder projects in later games.
The game as a whole is a lot of fun in the early stages, but can get tedious if you’ve played it a lot. Trying to get the right combination of synergies to complete harder projects can be a real pain, as often the resources required are so high that you must completely redesign everything within the settlement borders in order to ensure that they get enough resources.
This is augmented not only by the cooldown on giant powers, but also by the fact that resources that have been newly built do not get used immediately. They must become ‘in use’, which takes a little while. Projects always require resources in use and so this non-immediate use can really be annoying in certain situations!
Overall, this is a very enjoyable game, attempting to unlock as many new synergies and objects as possible, and occasionally just helping a settlement wipe out everyone else for the hell of it! It can also be surprisingly fun to simply watch the people in one of your settlements talk about stuff – inventing your own conversations for the symbols that come up in their speech bubbles. But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t last you a long time, unless you’re the kind of person that really gets into puzzle games. Reus is available from their own website or a number of other retailers including Steam and GOG for £6.99/$9.99.
