[Mobile Games] Terra Nil, recover, repo[CENSORED]te and collect (iPhone, Android,PC)

[@CharliAviless]

 

In this strategy game we have to recover wastelands devastated by pollution. It is called Terra Nil and it is as precious as it is brilliant in its design.

The Free Lives thing has no name: in barely a decade, this South African studio has touched all the sticks of the video game, from the most frenetic arcade with Broforce to the bloody commitment to virtual reality with Gorn, all of this going through projects as indescribable as the brilliant Genital Jousting satire, which is also a hilarious party game, or the vibrant Anger Foot, which is in development for computers. As if that were not enough, in their new project they have teamed up again with the publisher Devolver Digital and the support studio 24 Bit Games to launch Terra Nil, an ecological strategy game that has just been released on PC, iOS and Android through Netflix . In Vandal we have already played it and we will tell you what we think about it below.

More puzzle and strategy than traditional management
Terra Nil looks like a management game, but it's not even close to a traditional tycoon. It is more of a strategy game, a puzzle in three stages that challenges us to recover devastated environments: by placing buildings in squares we will have to decontaminate the area, plant new biomes and attract animal species, all paying points for each machine that we place, but without a time limit or random events that force us to react. The third and last step consists of retracing the path, collecting everything that we have placed to leave the place and let the animals and plants take care of it.

For this reason we say that it is not a management game, because we do not have to make a place to stay prosperous but to solve a pollution problem and leave. In addition, the buildings and technologies that we place do not have a loading or research time, they are immediate, and the only values that we have to take into account are the humidity, the temperature and the contamination of the place, nothing of happiness, resources or things for the style

It is also clear that Terra Nil has little interest in management in things like the fact that the machinery that we can deploy is subtly different in the four main biomes that we will have to recover before the credits roll. That amount, by the way, is later doubled with alternative versions of each one of them, which is where we have truly found a challenge due to how the ideas that we have been learning in the initial levels are combined. The duration in that sense can be somewhat short, although between secondary objectives and procedural generation the replayability is more than assured.

Environmentalism applied to mechanics
Thematically it can become a complicated game, as are all green-themed video games that are based on systems that perpetuate consumption rates contrary to what they propose. Not even if part of its profits go to the Endangered Wildlife Trust, an NGO that protects ecosystems in real life, Terra Nil gets rid of the contradiction inherent in any ecological video game. However, on this occasion, it fully complies with a didactic task that knows how to take advantage of the value of video games as a means of expression: Terra Nil teaches things from its mechanics, such as that sometimes destruction is a fundamental process for the creation of life or that the will to safeguard ecosystems is useless if we look at it from selfishness instead of basing ourselves on the real needs of the species.

https://vandal.elespanol.com/analisis/pc/terra-nil/101892#p-71