Imagine Earth

Think Civ6 meets Aven Colony meets... many other builders, perhaps even including Tropico. But pleasantly refreshing in look and feel, to be a worthy addition to that club. Triangular tile based expansion and building (like the hexes of Civ 6) with some ultra-cheezy generic NPCs and scenarios... It is very pretty, you can control game speed (pause and save at will) and money is a tricky challenge with many solutions. The "eco message" is somewhat in-yer-face. There's enough "push" to get you thinking of building your economy in a gentler, eco-friendly way. But if you want to spew out noxious gases and "terraform" your territory by destroying forests and mining resources, you most certainly can! I can even see how rapid pollution and prematurely raising sea levels can be a weapon to flood your rivals out of the competition. There is just enough complexity (adjacency bonuses, stock market, useful workshop "tools" you can build IF you have access to the right materials - and what you can't source naturally, you can buy from traders) to make the game challenging and interesting enough, while also being simple enough to pick up and put down as you like. I knocked off one star for the dumbest interface mistake of all time: When in a trading window, a tooltip pops up to explain what that resource is needed for. Great idea. But since that window pops up centred on the item, it obscures the two rows below. So, I instinctively move the cursor off the trading window to clear the tooltip, and... the trade window automatically closes. DOH! Especially bad, since there is PLENTY of spare screen available to the sides, for that tooltip to be placed alongside the trade window, obscuring nothing. This "obstruction leading to inst-close" feature is the one thing that really irks me. (Patch?) On the other hand, some of the quick access lists show which buildings are lacking upgrades, that can then be built from the list instead of visiting each building. Best feature eva!

The developer has offered an absolutely *amazing* support of the game - including supporting and updating the game just as on GOG as on Steam. I am 36 hours into the game and am frankly having a really great time playing the game... Surely I have experienced minor annoyances or bugs but the developer has fixed stuff at record speed. The theme of the game , which I have seen annoys some , is fine by me , I even enjoy it ! IMO the developer deserves game communiity's support so I think that people ought to give the game a go with an open mind, who knows maybe you will enjoy the game too !

Even in the early access version this game had gotten me, and there were so many updates and improvements to make it even better. The player get a fully customizable sandbox simulator, being able to choose mostly everything: planet type, vegetation, dangers, rivals, factions... you name it! Do you want to follow a campaign and take more seriously the environmental changes your actions have upon the planet and its residents? Go for it, you´ll have a challenges? Maybe you´d rather enjoy a beautiful game and build whatever you want and wherever you want it, fully colonizing the place, "abducting" its native residents and having an administration playground which covers the entire surface - just like Isaac Asmov´s Terminus -, with no cataclysmic events, pollution or rivals to bother you? No problem! The U.I. is beautiful in design, pretty easy to understand - although there are great tutorials for everything. A really creative tech-tree, quite loyal to the game´s subjects. And, at last but not at least, both professional and exquisite characters added to the game´s story. Personally, this is the perfect game for its genre.

The game does a good job of being in the middle ground between a free city optimization game and a "survival" game. As long as you keep a decent stock of resources, the disasters are impactful but not stressful even if you don't have the infrastructure to counter them. There are some UI design issues that make some items take more clicks than they should, and you may often cancel quest tips accidentally. There is a dialogue log however, so you can go there to check what you accidentally dismissed. It has the environmentalist tone to it, but contrary to the in-game dialogue (voiced adequately by real people), pollution is a resource and not a dark art that needs to be avoided. You can choose to expand destructively with cheap but harmful techs and then switch or upgrade later if the number of diasters starts getting annoying. (I tested this by maxing the ocean level rise and brought it back down, only needing to drop my population by about 5% during the recovery.) At max pollution, I had about 3 disasters going on simultaneously, but my city was actually still "profitable" during that time: you can make LOTS of errors at normal difficulty without a game over. I would recommend if you like a city builder that has some survival elements but don't like getting wiped and resetting.