This is a good game that's about fixing up instead of destroying things for a change. It's not very long, but I find it quite relaxing. It took me about 7.5 hours to get through the game on the easy difficulty, and that's enough for me.
I got this for free with a subscription on another platform.
Terra Nil is a simple, relaxing, slow-paced puzzle game with varying difficulty levels, none of which are too challenging.
IMHO it's best enjoyed on mobile touch devices, due to its simplicity and casual character.
The mechanics are not too many and each are super simple. You will have seen them all in a relatively short time, and applying them is easy.
Throughout, the game tries to relax rather than challenge the player. It starts with a tutorial that eases players into the game, and introduces new mechanics in rapid (maybe too rapid) succession.
There isn't much of a story, no hard science, and not much tech background either. So, if you are a techie nerd, this is most certainly not the simulation you are looking for.
Terra Nil works well as a casual puzzle game with pleasing visuals, that is rather short and therefor best enjoyed in short bursts; during your daily commute, or a lunch break. If that's you, then you might fall in love. Otherwise, you may feel a bit disappointed at the lack of content and overall challenge.
Terra Nil's gameplay involves transforming barren landscapes into lush, thriving environments through three basic steps- first, creating water and arable land, second, creating specific biomes for plants and animals to inhabit, and third, ensuring that the animals have all their needs met, while picking up after yourself by recycling all the equipment you used to achieve the first two steps, leaving behind a pristine wilderness.
The challenge is in the limitations placed on you- you might have to thaw permafrost to reach the ground, clean up clouds of radiation, dredge the ocean to make your own land, or find a way to make your equipment accessible by boat or monorail during the recycling phase. It's fun puzzling it out, but there are only 12 levels and it's not particularly challenging- on the second highest difficulty level, I never once ran out of resources. The brevity, combined with some annoying little problems, make it hard to recommend buying this unless it's on sale. I wouldn't go so far as to call the game unfinished, but it feels rushed out.
As an example, the final level is... the third from the end. This wasn't a bug, the other levels are literally locked off and unplayable until you beat what was obviously intended to be the last level of the game. You take off into space, leaving the planet behind as the credits roll... and then there are two more, slightly easier levels. Completing them too rewards you with nothing. Getting 100 percent completion on every level rewards you with... also nothing.
Sometimes an object you should be able to move with the monorail will be unselectable, or hidden behind an animal's status with no way to reach it, or tooltips will hide the area of effect of something you're trying to build. It's not game-breaking but it's irritating.
I was expecting to learn something about real life ecology or at least get an interesting story, but the game offers neither. It's disappointingly shallow. There's missed potential here.
I've seen Terra Nil billed as a "reverse city builder", which isn't entirely on the money. It's more of a loosey-goosey procedural puzzle game that unfolds in phases; windmills generate electricity but can only be placed on rock tiles, they in turn power other machines which have this or that effect on the terrain, some grow grass on dirt, others carve riverbeds but raze surrounding terrain, one generates new rock tiles on riverbanks, etc. It's an interesting balancing act to poke around with and you always need to be wary of your limited currency. There's difficulty settings for a more hardcore challenge or alternatively to turn it into a chill, pretty landscaping toy. Good stuff.
Restoring the ecosystem gives way to optimizing habitats for the wildlife, you snap a few photos, and when you're all done you pack everything up in an airship and leave.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
Along the way you may well encounter regular, significant performance hitches, to the tune of the game grinding to a halt during more intensive moments like the "controlled burn" phase. And then, all the animals happy, all the chaff recycled and the airship set for launch... the game might just fail to register that the level is complete. If you back out to the menu and resume in an attempt to jar the missed progression flag loose, it may just magically delete the airship, leaving you with a 100% complete level that will never be able to register as complete.
This may even happen on the very first level, as it in fact has for me, barring me from the entire rest of the game.
This game launched two and a half years ago and is still so broken that I can't actually play it. What exactly am I supposed to say to that? It's a neat little game for sure, but this is absolutely inexcusable, and from what I gather the Switch and mobile ports are even more egregiously broken.
It hurts not to recommend it, but I sincerely can't.
This could be a nice and relaxing game, if it weren't for the pretty much game breaking bugs. Without the bugs, I would give it 3,5 stars... but getting stuck repeatedly on the same mission (with 25% completion) because of an unfixed bug is a no go. (Check the steam discussions... same problem there...)