It is a sandbox game where there is no set goal. You can choose what animal you want to have and than start breeding toward that goal, picking up genes from strays and form mutation. This part is fun, but game play is not. Main problem is too many clicking around. You have to control each action to each member of your pack. 3 action per turn per animal, multiply by number of animals ( you need around 10 ) so 30 clicks per turn. Baby needs 5 turns before you can breed him/her. Riding off undesirable genes and fix desirable traits takes many generations. As result game is click feast when most of the time you forces to do something not related to breeding. Picking berries, hunting, fishing get bored.
It would be much more fun if you do not need to micromanage each and every animal. Let's genes define their behavior and just concentrate on breeding.
Niche becomes boring and tedious after some time. Controls require you to be extra precise in your clicks: action buttons on the board are quite small, selecting an animal can be inconvenient because they might be covered by an action button. Technical execution is somewhat sub-par: for me the game crashes upon startup if any other hardware-accelerated software is running, it also hogs available videocard resources way-way-way more than it should (it's a Unity project, so yeah).
Honestly, the best parts of the game are main menu and those minimalist loading screens. No joke, it takes real talent to make a white "Loading..." text on a monotone background look so good.
Niche has a very original approach to the genre of survival games. There is a whole pack of animals instead of a single character to keep alive. An entire species, in fact. The gameplay is so long term that the player has to keep a species alive for generations on end. Therefore, it is necessary to manipulate natural selection to get desirable traits in the next generation. Some animals would starve, some would get killed and eaten, some would age. But the survival and evolution of the species would be the result. It is even a good idea to mate certain animals in this way in order to get different branches of evolution: Some specific animals will specialise in feeding on land and others in feeding in water. Once again, this is a very original idea for a game, one that is fun and also somewhat educational. And the graphics are absolutely cute. A nice family game for children.
And for some extension, this game resembles another one of the genre, like The Long Dark, or of the other genres, like Sid Meier's Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, or even The Sims. Free play is better than campaign for these specific types of games. In the niche, there is a campaign with a simple story: A cub named Adam is kidnapped by a predator, so the pack sets out on a mission to rescue him. To do this, the player has to complete a number of levels. Each level is more difficult than the previous one, and is set in a different environment. The problem is that passing a level means getting from point A to point B. Simple, right? Well, not in a mechanic that rewards settling down in a safe place with plenty to eat instead of living a nomadic life. And the story gets ridiculous when entire generations travel, die of old age and are replaced by another to save a cub that remains forever young.
Free play is still recommended for fans of survival games. Perhaps this is a good game for children to learn about survival. Still, The Long Dark has better story and campaign.
Niche - a genetics survival game is a fun, addicting survival/breeding game. It has good graphics, a nice variety of creatures and a lot of replay value. I haven't completely played through the story mode yet, due to dying and restarting because I didn't like the way things were progressing. I made it to the 227 day before my species went extinct the first time. I've been playing around trying different types of strategies, it's an interesting and addicting game.
