Reus

The game is based around strategic placement of animals and minerals and controlling the growth of civilizations, and plays much more like a puzzle in real time, learning the synergies of the various plants and animals is the key to advancing. Extremely fun and addicting for approximately 10 hours, after which point it becomes long and repetitive to continually play for several hours to unlock one plant or animal. Graphics are superb, and the style adds to the character of the game and fits the theme. Overall a fun and relaxing game, but be prepared to waste many hours if you want to unlock everything.

Very simple from afar, you'll soon realize that it is a much more complex and intricate game the more you play it. If you like management and repercussions, you'll love it, evolving your cities, giving them wonders, and maybe having to put some dangerous beasts or directly wreck their armies when they get too greedy. A really interesting take on management that I quite enjoy. Definitely worth checking.

A charming 2d God Game in which you control giants with magic powers over nature that move along the equator creating habitable land for greedy humans to settle on. Be careful not to give them too much too fast, or they may attack you when you can't.

I should clarify that this is not a strategy game or god game. It more akin to a management game. Everything that takes place in the game is a result of the resources that you create. That is not a criticism of the game, I rather like the way all the elements fall together. Reus stays a very unique title even 3 years after its release. In Reus the player controls 4 titans which each have different abilities that interact with each other. The player uses the different abilities to create resources. If resources are available a village will settle near them. Players interact with villages by placing resources within a village's boundaries. Periodically each village will initiate a timed challenge based upon the resources currently available to the village. Completing these challenges give you an ambassador which unlocks more abilities from a titan during that playthrough. There are 5 biomes in the game: swamp, forest, desert, mountain, ocean, and wasteland. With the exception of wasteland each biome has a different set of resources that can exist there. Each resource can generally be upgraded about 3-5 times (you get a choice of two for each upgrade). These upgrades are usually branching so there are around 15-20 different upgrades per resource type per biome. As you can tell there is a huge amount of variety in this game. The main reason that I keep coming back to this game is probably how relaxing it is. That is not to say the game is easy though. The difficulty of the game lies in completing challenges (of which there is a long list) to unlock higher level upgrades for resources. It is very hard to lose in this game (it is possible though). But the higher level challenges are very difficult and will take careful planning to execute. The planning involved is mostly centered around space management and a deep understanding of the different synergies between higher level resources. If you want a relaxing title with strategic depth I highly highly recommend Reus.

A beautiful puzzle-game. Starts out as a relaxing casual-type game with tons of stuff to explore. But before that gets tiresome, the game gets rapidly harder, and the puzzle-mechanics are really starting to flourish. I find myself coming back and back again to try out new strategies and combinations.