Copyright Inverse
Starting a new strategy game, particularly of the city-building variety, is often a daunting task. You can expect to sit through extensive tutorials on a game’s unique mechanics and interface, often delivered as you flounder your way through an introductory mission or two, before being set loose to test your knowledge. But where many similar games treat their tutorials as a test to pass before you’re certified to play the real game, Reus 2 makes learning as you go part of the fun, which is just one of the things that make it so appealing. Reus 2, which comes to Nintendo Switch and Xbox today after launching on PC last year, isn’t technically a city builder at all, though in its focus on distributing resources and placing settlements, it feels a lot like one. Instead, it’s a god game, part of the lineage of games like Lionhead Studio’s Black & White. Rather than just building a city, you’re building a world, using your divine influence to shape the planet into something more hospitable for its hapless human inhabitants. That may sound like a lot of responsibility to shoulder, and it certainly can be, but Reus 2 is far more approachable than it may sound. A big part of that is about presentation. The planet you’re watching over is an orb you can spin like a wheel, rendered in two dimensions so you’re only looking at a small slice of the surface at any given time. There’s lots of information you need to keep track of to play optimally, and quite a few menus’ worth of actions you can make to manage your growing world, but Reus 2’s interface is focused and uncluttered, keeping you from getting overwhelmed with all your options at once. Even its cartoony art style plays a part in making the game approachable. Each game of Reus 2 starts on a barren planet, with three watchful gods looming overhead responsible for filling it with plants, animals, and minerals. The gods of Reus 2 are quite anthropocentric, and your ultimate goal is to shape the planet to help its human inhabitants thrive, though you rarely control them directly. The only real control you have over your pet humans is telling them where to found a new settlement. You can terraform the planet as you see fit, placing rainforests, oceans, and other biomes, each of which is most suited to producing one type of resource (food, science, or gold). Likewise, each human civilization favors one of the same resources, and they’ll offer quests mostly focused on gathering more. Once the humans settle in and start building, your goal is just to arrange the planet to succeed in those quests, which adds to the Prosperity score by which you’ll be judged at the end of a round. Reus 2 refers to everything you can add to the world — the plants, animals, and minerals your gods commands — as Biotica. Each costs a certain amount of your godly power to manifest, and when you run out of that, the planet moves into a new era. Each era has its own goals, and new options are unlocked based on your performance in the last era. Completing their main goals can unlock new Biotica when the round ends, and trying out new eras is a good way to keep the game feeling fresh by mixing up your objectives. When it comes to actually placing Biotica, Reus 2 starts to feel more like a puzzle game than the open-ended god games of the past. The number of tiles on which you can place Biotica is strictly limited, so figuring out the best combination to reach your goals can be challenging. Most Biotica offers bonuses based on the biodiversity of their biomes or which other Biotica they’re placed next to, and maximizing the extra effects you get from them is the key to doing well. At times that can make Reus 2 feel a little prescriptive, as some ways of building the world are clearly superior to others, but as you unlock more Biotica, the number of ways you can reach your goals grow and the game gets more interesting. While Reus 2 is all about creating order, one of its biggest assets is its sense of surprise. The game’s tutorial teaches you the basics, but makes it clear that there’s a lot left to learn. You know just enough to get by at the start, but Reus 2 has a lot more to it than that, leaving plenty of room for discovery as you play. Just about everything in the game has a floating tooltip that explains its mechanics in detail, but that means that your first encounter with new mechanics is often surprising before you get to read up on it. That all makes Reus 2 an experience that starts simply but slowly unfolds more depth once it can be reasonably sure you’re ready for it, turning the whole game into a process of discovery. Reus 2 might not make you feel as omnipotent as the god games that defined the genre, but its more directed form of world creation is a satisfying mix of chill and challenging. Reus 2 is available now on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
