

The different regions have a lot of various unique elements as they vary from typical green areas to tundra to even a destroyed city that has you planting arboretums in the foundations of ruined buildings. Phase two requires you to restore four biomes, which can be pretty tricky, as you’ll need to balance them out. If you mess up you can either restart a region or retry from the start of the phase. There’s a lot of strategy involved regarding how you place your machines. Finally, you need to reintroduce animal life and then clean up all of your machines, leaving the region as if humans were never there. Once the environment is a bit more habitable, the next phase has you recreating the region’s proper biomes. You need to be able to generate power to scrub the areas of toxins and then use a machine to restore greenery. Your initial goal is to restore four regions of the planet before you take off in your rocket. There isn’t a massive amount of content and it’s more akin to a puzzle game than I’d been expecting, but this is an excellent game with a truly unique, compelling focus.

Instead of creating human settlements to junk up the environment, you’re instead restoring what humans have seemingly ruined. It’s functionally similar to a city builder, but with the opposite focus. This is why Terra Nil got my attention in a big way. I don’t want to place buildings and gather resources so human civilizations can thrive, it just doesn’t interest me. I gotta be up front about this – I don’t care about city builder games.
