![]() ![]() If your resources drop to zero, you'll need to start again. If you get carried away plopping down buildings to increase biodiversity, it's easy to forget that you're pulling from a limited pool of supplies. All buildings cost leaves, which is the generic resource you gather while spreading greenery. Altering the climate presents more meters to fill, and tweaking the temperature and humidity to suit your liking is trivial.Īdmittedly, there is a small bit of resource management in this second stage that helps liven things up a touch. To grow Tundra, you must put Irrigators on high ground and have low humidity. Sometimes I found myself stumped for a second because of specific requirements, such as needing to have an Irrigator on high ground instead of low, but this can be corrected in about the time it takes to grab another rich tea biscuit with your spare hand. I select the building, plonk it somewhere that the map tells me is suitable, and watch the percentage bar in the corner tick slightly higher. Sure, they have different names and appearances, but it all feels like I'm just chasing numbers. In the same way, using Arboretums to create forests or Algae Greenhouses to cover rocks with lichens feel one and the same in Terra Nil. If both are in the biscuit tin, there’s no pondering which you’d prefer, because they offer an almost identical experience. But, regardless of which biscuit you bought in your weekly shop, you’ll still devour them in two seconds, and they'll both still taste like cardboard ( ed: an outrageous slander, Hayden). One's better for dunking, you might scream, and one has slightly more crunch. ![]() The processes are indeed different, but in the same way that a digestive and a rich tea biscuit are different. You can also send these greenhouses along a monorail and chuck them in the ocean to grow kelp underwater, killing two birds with one stone. On a later level, you use Igneous Heatsinks to cool lava and form rock, on which you can then grow lichens using an Algae Greenhouse. To make forests, for example, you might need to first burn some of those fynbos with a Solar Amplifier, before scattering Arboretums across the ash piles that are left behind. Do enough to fill the percentage bar, and your job's a good'un. Whack beehives on trees to make fynbos, or chuck Hydroponiums on top of Irrigators to create wetland. In stage two, the goal is to increase biodiversity, and you get another batch of buildings to help grow different types of plants. It's a chill setup stage, but one that never really changes as you progress through the four main levels. That creates a flurry of leaves that zip towards your percentage meter, and when that reaches 100%, you’re onto the next step. You whack down some power resources, cover the land in Toxic Scrubbers to remove the pollution they produce, and then chuck down some Irrigators to grow grass. These differ slightly depending on the map - the first has Turbines to provide power, while a later snowy map has Geothermal Plants, for example - but you go through more or less exactly the same motions per map. You do so using buildings that appear in a row along the bottom of the screen. The first stage always involves painting that beige box with some vivid verde. Your progress for the current stage is indicated with a couple of percentage meters in the top-left corner, and completing all three means mission accomplished. A handbook, which you can whip out at any time, breaks down each level into three stages. Regardless of which level you start with in Terra Nil, it plops you onto a desolate wasteland that’s yours to save. Getting to that point, though, is an often repetitive experience marred with frustration. When it all comes together and you can look over the fruits of your labour, birds chirping and piano melodically playing in the background, it’s beautiful. You replace pollution with lush life across a series of four randomly generated dioramas (plus four slightly more complicated challenge levels), covering the landscape in fynbos and forests, lichen and lagoons. Terra Nil is a puzzle-citybuilder about reclaiming the environment. A puzzle-citybuilder about rejuvenating the environment, Terra Nil has an almost lovely message, but it's buried beneath tedious chores. ![]()
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