It's a delight to play at every turn, and it strikes the perfect balance between providing new content and not overloading players. Beneath its unassuming appearance exists a challenging experience that will last a good long time.
There are some truly brilliant concepts on display here, and this is the first fantastic god game the genre has seen in a long time. It’s a shame that the lack of game modes hinders Reus so much, as it’s really something special.
I love this game, I love everything about it, its colors, its gameplay, its menu, the concept... everything. For those of you looking for that indie gem that will captivate you for hours, this is it.
Reus is such a well-designed game! There are three tutorials which go by quickly, teach you everything you need to know about the game without being heavy handed, and are quite fun. Then you're launched into the real game. At first, you can only play 30-minute sessions, but as you play, you unlock the ability to play 60-minute, then 120-minute sessions. Even after the tutorials, there are loads of things to unlock (which you unlock by trying different styles of play) and tons of things to learn. The game is very good about encouraging experimentation. Even the tutorials will say things like, "Experiment with X," so you learn without losing any sense of exploration or control.
The in-game achievements each correspond to a Steam achievement, and they all encourage different play styles. One might be, "End an era with only one village," and another might be, "End the game with six co-existant villages." If you get both of these achievements, you have played two very different games.
It's hard to explain what makes the game so fun. However, I know half the fun is in learning the game for yourself, so I won't try to spoil that for you. If you're looking for a short-ish game with infinite replay value, Reus is for you.
As delightful and clever as Reus is, the intensity of the play when you find yourself juggling multiple projects unfortunately lets it down, as it doesn't feel built to support such action.
Most of the times it takes too much effort to make all the small things of your world run smoothly, but when it happens, it's a rewarding accomplishment.
An interesting experiment, Reus is more a puzzle than a god-game. That might turn off some genre aficionados, but doesn't make it a bad game, far from it. If you can appreciate its hidden complexity and peculiar mechanics, Reus will definitely capture you.
Reus is a god game, but not one that makes you feel particularly omnipotent. That’s partly because all the divine heavy lifting and occasional smiting is performed indirectly, by a set of elemental colossi, but also because Reus’ complex simulation can be rather daunting. God is in the details, it’s true, but he didn’t have to think quite so hard about them.
"Hmmm... another city, colony, or civilization management simulator..." this was the first thought about Reus. Well, that thought turned out to be wrong. I was skeptical at first, but soon enough Reus turned out to be one hell of a pleasant surprise!
While the game might look simplistic, childish or even shallow, because of the colorful visuals and the concept of giants ruling the world, I promise you this is not the case. Being a Civilization series veteran, I'm used to deep and complex games. While Reus might not compare with Civilization 5 or other games on that subject, it definitely provides a sophisticated enough mechanism to keep people like me interested, at least so far.
The idea in the game is to contribute to the development of the colonies by supplying resources and improvements, mainly plants, animals and minerals of different sorts. But in order to unlock the better, more advanced resources and improvements (called "aspects" in-game), you must explore and use the more basic options, or you can't progress and reach the advanced stuff. Needless to say, I guess, that the more advanced your giants are, the bigger and more prosperous colonies they can sustain, support and control. ...yes, control. Sometimes a colony gets greedy and arrogant and attacks your giants, and needs a good kick in the ass. In some cases it's even necessary to destroy a colony, if it looks hopeless.
Also, the humans in the colonies will try and develop projects of different sorts, and you're supposed to help them meet the required criteria (if you want that project to succeed). The trick is to choose the optimal combination of resources to supply to the colony, factoring in the resource's position, its level, and the level of synergy it might or might not have with other resources nearby, plus the project's criteria, of course. So far, most projects need specific amounts of either food, wealth or technology or any combination of them. Some projects, though, will also require one or more unusual conditions, such as winning a war with another colony or having another colony completely destroyed (either by going to war or by "divine intervention").
There are more aspects to the game, some of which I don't fully understand myself yet, but I promise to update if I feel l learn something important enough. For one, you have time limits, both for the "Era" type of game (what I've been playing so far) and for the projects. Obviously, it complicates things.
Anyway, to summarize this this game is way more complex and rewarding than it seems, or at least more than it seemed to me at first. If you like strategy and colony management, get it, definitely worth it!
I spent a hilariously amount of time trying to remember the name of this game to write a review about it even I though I don't have much to say. Roux Ruex Reux Deux Duex, then I thought maybe it did not end in an X. Figuring this out was more satisfying than playing the game. My nieces and nephews like playing the game just to build and destroy stuff. I put a couple of hours into it and was not getting it. You want me to do this. Okay, so I have to do this and this, but this takes forever to do. Am I not doing something, right? Thus, I never got into it. I think it is still worth hearing from people who gave it a solid try but could not get into it.
Reus
A fun, but repetitive challenge..
Reus is a strategy math puzzle god game where you control 4 different giants…
Forest, Earth, Ocean, and Swamp…
Each giant has its own special ability, but they all interact with each other while world building…
The concept is simple… you need to bring life to the planet…
You start with either an ocean or a desert…
The ocean allows you to create a forest or a swamp, and then you need to place life in the form of either animals or food…
Once you do this people will settle and build a village... they’ll start a project which tells you the materials you need and its up to you to balance the small space to ensure you can provide enough materials for the village to strive…
And you can manage as many as youd like, but again you only get 4 giants for the entire world, and their abilities have cool downs, so juggling will definitely take skill…
As you complete projects you will earn an unlock for an ability of one of the 4 giants…
This is where the strategy ultimately comes into play, especially trying to unlock skills around the type of environment you want to build on…
And each project gets increasingly harder causing you to have e to mix and match different character abilities to add wealth to an animal for example… and strategically place plants animals and minerals to boost the stats of surrounding materials…
And at first you get only 30 minutes to play around with your world and complete challenges to eventually unlock the 1 hr. and 2 hr. long modes…
You can knock out challenges 1 play through at a time or you can tackle them all at once…
But if you do go for a juggling act you have to be careful as settlements that grow too fast get greedy…..
The more you provide, the more projects you complete, the less the villagers are impressed by you…
They’ll start attacking other villages and this is where you have to step in…
If a settlement gets too out of hand you have the power to crush them….
To burn them… add danger to humble them, or drown them…
Unfortunately though while I definitely found my first few hours to be very enjoyable…
The game doesn’t ever really throw in new hurtles for you to deal with….
So the gameplay ultimately starts to feel slow and frustrating at times trying to get the math right to allow an area to prosper…
I found the most fun in the chaos of building multiple settlements at once.. Jumping around to different areas…
But even then it feels a bit at a crawl as the giants move at a snail’s pace, and the cool downs especially when you’re focused on one spot at a time feel just a bit too slow…
Ultimately there’s no hook to keep you going... the game doesn’t do enough to keep itself from feeling painfully repetitive after your first few experiences with it..
That being said if you’re a math fan, Reus will offer a decent amount of fun and a great challenge
I Give Reus a 7.0/10
Reus is a great idea crippled by it's interface.
This game has a lot going for it. The idea is sound you are the God of a planet who holds sway over four golems that live on the surface. Using the power of the golems, you can change the face of the planet and encourage or destroy the growth of life.
In terms of mechanics, the game is all about synergy placing various objects next to each other to boost their performance. Do a good job, and humans will arrive. From time to time, if your humans get too greedy, they will go to war. You then have to decide whether to let it play out or strike them all down with a biblical horror-show.
In terms of pros, it's fun watching your golems do their thing. The game offers up little challenges every now and then to encourage the development of your golems. Terra-forming was fun and the design of the game would be good for teaching kids about nature.
In terms of cons, the interface is horrible. You are constantly clicking on golems trying to figure out what is unlocked and what is not unlocked because each game is only 30 minutes long and each new game resets all the golems. There are many missed opportunities specifically in the water biomes in terms of what you can and can't build.
The game to play would be Reus 2 this game but with a bunch of enhancements and a whole new interface that allows the user to quickly find spells, creatures, synergies, and events. Until that game arrives, this one for me is a pass.
It's just a bad game. There is no game-play. In my opinion, you spend a bit of time understand it and after that is just boring. On the positive, the game has nice art work which was the reason I bought it in the first place. I definitely regret buying it..
SummaryReus is a god game by Abbey Games in which you take control of nature through the hands of mighty giants. You possess all imaginable powers over nature! There is only one thing on the planet that you do not control: mankind, with all their virtues and and all their vices. You can shape their world, but not their will. It’s your responsib...