Terra Nil is an inverted city-builder game. Rather than placing buildings to create an ever growing metropolis, you place buildings to clean up the environment, rewild it and then recycle everything you placed – leaving no trace behind. The whole game is basically sold upon this schtick, but it is such a cool one I felt compelled to share!
Each level is broken up into several phases
- Clean-up, in which you place a series of buildings to clean up water and land until you have cleaned up enough land to unlock the next phase.
- Biome creation, which involves placing buildings and modifying the climate, in order to meet the quotas for the different kinds of biome required.
- Animal spotting, in which you click around your map hoping to find a good place for each species, tweaking the biomes to make them more suitable if necessary. This is technically part of final phase but it kind of straddles the line of the second and final phases.
- Stop it and tidy-up, when you build infrastructure to remove the infrastructure placed in previous phases, along with removing the building removal infrastructure.
I enjoyed all of the phases except the animal spotting. You didn’t usually need to do any biome tweaking unless you wanted to 100% the animal spotting, I just read the blurb and then click around the roughly matching areas.
The game is pretty short but it offers just enough variety and length to keep it interesting. It is broken up into several levels, each offering slightly different biomes and challenges, making it nice to play on mobile.
Dean Sas 