Picking Up Steam: Reus (PC)
The Forest Giant, an ape-like titan made of wood and adorned with plants. The Ocean Giant, a towering crab whose cracked shell and piercing eyes make it look fierce. The Rock Giant, a colossal being made of boulders where its hard exterior is softened by its gentle expression. The Swamp Giant, a lumpy green mass that looks like its barely able to keep itself upright. These four giants preside over a small world in Reus where they can freely reshape the land, place plants, and even manifest animal life. However, there is one thing in their world that exists outside their powers, humanity both the beneficiaries of all these world molding powers but also the greatest threat to the work of these usually benevolent titans.
Reus, named for the Dutch word for giant, is a god game where you control the four giants to try and cater a world towards human development, the way societies evolve and act contingent on what you’ve granted them and what you’ve placed in their world. Each one of the giants has specialties befitting their element, the Ocean Giant able to dig out huge pools for water and the Forest and Swamp Giants then able to use the nearby moist earth to create their associated biomes. The Rock Giant is a bit unique though, its efforts to change the land starting by raising a mountain that can alter the landscape even within other biomes but can also create deserts provided they are far enough from the oceans. This essentially gives you a few different society types, humans willing to settle in forests, swamps, and deserts and make use of the water or mountains should they be close enough to the slowly expanding towns.
Beyond laying some literal groundwork for the civilizations, you’ll soon need to try and nudge humanity into prosperous directions by having the giants place resources. Despite an entire planet being yours to customize, the available space is more like a 2D ring with designated spaces, so if you want to place some blueberry bushes or a place for a salt mine, it will take up a spot and must be placed within the borders of a town to provide its boons. There are some resources that can reach beyond their spot though, animals spreading out into nearby territory, but even more important are the synergies that certain resources can have with each other. Each resource provides something to the city whose borders they occupy, Food, Wealth, and Technology the most important for developing the town but Awe and Danger can help keep people from becoming spoiled and turning against their gods or other cities. If you place certain resources near each other though, their output can change such as Mackerel able to cover more territory and provide more boosts if placed beside other Mackerel while the Seabass instead likes Mackerel nearby since having available prey increases its own food value. Essentially, figuring out the optimal layouts for the resources you can generate for a town ends up the main concern for your giants, humanity often reaching points where they want to develop great projects like a Toolshop, Hospital, Castle, or even a Sacrificial Altar based on the path their development took. Completing these projects requires a certain amount of resources and for places like the Circus there may even be minimum requirements like having a certain amount of spaces dedicated to animals, the player needing to puzzle out how to make available land work towards these efforts so the cities can keep growing and producing more great works.
While projects are markers of growth and prosperity, humanity completing them also benefits you. A completed work provides an ambassador, a giant able to pick one up to unlock new abilities. Ambassadors are absolutely crucial to success because your giants actually start off fairly limited, able to place down important resources but not really cultivate them. With ambassadors from different regions though, they can start enhancing plants, minerals, and animals, and a rather large web of connections is formed between which each giant can do. The Rock Giant can’t make animals, but it can grant Exotic boosts to them. The Ocean Giant makes no plants, but its Growth Aspect can help some vegetation achieve upgrades. In fact, just as important as what you place is how you develop it further with the mix of abilities you cultivate, although there are other limits in the way of this like low level projects eventually not rewarding ambassadors and the game insisting you never let the giants get too many more ambassadors than each other.
Figuring out how to make these mechanics work for you is part of the cerebral challenge in Reus. You can pause if you need time to consider things, but with how slow giants move and how long some recharges are, you can just as often not need it since you can ponder things while the giants are plodding along to go do their ordered tasks. The game begins first with a 30 minutes mode available and once you’ve hit a few development benchmarks it will grant a 60 minute variant and eventually the 120 mode, but there’s something a bit disheartening about how the game decides to handle unlocks. Reus places many milestone goals for you to shoot for, some of these being simple markers of success like how prosperous you’ve managed to get a city, others measure certain actions like how many wars your civilization has won, and others are about specific styles of play like building up only a single city or building a city with a heavy reliance on the sea. The projects tie to these as well, but unlocks can be things crucial for city development and yet you are barred from using them until you’ve completed the run that unlocks that resource. Seeing your efforts to build up a society stymied by the fact you practically need a more plentiful food resource but haven’t unlocked it yet dampens some enthusiasm for repeated runs, especially since you might not immediately recognize that a project is fully outside your grasp. You might end up puzzling over how to squeeze more efficiency out of a city completely unaware what you actually need is the next unlock that lets you reach such high numbers, but at the same time, the unlock system gives you meaningful goals to shoot for. It is satisfying to clear a run and see the milestone rewards roll in and it encourages you to play in a variety of ways, but since unlocks are only earned after ending an era, you can’t even do things like potentially unlock a useful resource mid-run that would avoid these annoying roadblock moments.
Reus also starts to have a few other niggling bugbears that start to undermine your godly work. The most unambiguously disruptive is the game’s tendency to crash. You can save most any time thankfully, and in fact, since sometimes your boosts can be randomly more effective, it might almost be smart to force that matter through saves and reloads since otherwise rebuilding a resource is a waste of precious time and recharge periods. However, if you aren’t going to become a close friend to the pause menu, you might instead find the game crashing when you click outside the game, something the game even encourages by having a link to its wiki on the main menu. The game may crash if you take a screenshot, but the saddest situation is the Rock Giant in particular seems to cause crashes quite often. I found it crashed the game multiple times when it tried to raise mountains and even its earthquake attack you can use to put people in check if they start opposing giants or end up too war hungry for their own good. In a game about perfecting your work, having a good deal of work lost is always painful, but the humans can also have some annoying quirks to contend with as well. You don’t get to pick where humans settle, you place a resource and they’ll build nearby. Sometimes they’re smart about it, sometimes they build in an odd spot that will hamper their growth like being too close to water. Even more damaging though is their sometimes terrible placement for projects, outright destroying vital places like mines or even blocking off synergies by isolating plants in pockets that lose their usefulness because they’ve been boxed in by buildings.
Runs through Reus should have fun surprises and unique consequences for your choices, but it also feels like many small things outside your control can undermine your work be they humanity’s whims or the unlock system. Runs can start to blur together as you need to push people towards similar development to make up for those rounds where they literally couldn’t complete certain projects before, although despite the fact the giants go to sleep after an era timer is up, you are granted the option to keep playing after if you care more about completing a project than hitting the milestones for example. In fact, Reus also offers an Alt Mode that allows for you to gain a little more freedom or alter certain aspects of the game. You can play on a much larger world, you can make your giants take far less damage from citizen uprisings, and you can even speed up the giants a bit that helps alleviate some of that not-so-helpful pokey movement that holds you back. Alt Mode doesn’t want you to be too powerful though, you can’t get your abilities for the giants unlocked out of the gate although you can get a few starting ambassadors as well as a full ability unlock should a giant get four ambassadors on board. Alt Mode still requires smarts and strategy, your citizens can still lead themselves to ruin and developing land is still about identifying synergies and placing things properly, but some elements like the movement speed boost just feel like they should have been part of the main game rather than locked to the less serious mode.
Reus ends up with a few things working against its work being satisfying, but it also has moments of triumph because the hindrances aren’t usually the kind that doom your run. Little stories can develop in your world, such as you trying to cultivate a warrior village for one of the milestones only for them to get trounced so often by their neighbors that the peaceful people end up with the war wins earning you that unlock instead. You might try to get a city going too quickly, only to not realize those herds of javelinas you gave them for meat are too dangerous for their current level and watch the unusual situation of a city being wiped from the map by feral hogs. The high end projects will ask for unlocks eventually, but the ones you can squeak through by utilizing your wits are rewarding to see complete. Humanity being outside your control isn’t a problem, your influence on their growth is the trial you undergo as the player, needing to figure out how to cater to them but also keep them from ruin. You can get to know a little society well even within the shorter sessions, it just feels like there are a few concepts that need cleaning up to prevent some runs being defined more by the wrong kinds of limitations on your giants’ growth and how far a civilization can grow.
THE VERDICT: Helping build up human societies in Reus can be both satisfying and frustrating in ways that work for the format. Your lack of direct control over humanity means their failures can be irritating but their successes feel even better earned than if you had been giving direct orders. The logic puzzle of trying to cater to their needs, help them build projects, and avoid their destructive tendencies gives Reus a core that makes it worth revisiting even when some parts feel samey or you contend with game crashes and luck of the draw when providing certain boosts. The unlock system encourages you to play in new ways at least even if it just as much impedes your ability to cultivate humanity to its max potential, but triumphs and amusing surprises keep Reus engaging enough to at least see the game through a few eras.
And so, I give Reus for PC…
An OKAY rating. Reus can feel a bit like parenthood at times. You can do your very best for someone, but they can still make dumb mistakes despite it being rewarding to see them thrive. At the same time, Reus obfuscates a lot of things and either hopes you check out its wiki to figure them out or expects you to learn the hard way when you come up against the walls it set up by way of unlocks. Developing a civilization is a fun little bit of management, figuring out what works well a puzzle to unravel, but then if you fall short of a project because the limited city space all but guarantees you need higher quality upgrades you don’t have yet, and you’re left with not much choice but a repeat run just to get to that point once more. Reus has depth but also feels rigid and repetitive at times because of a mix of slow growth and limited time to do it in. Alt Mode provides an interesting staging ground for where improvements could be made though, things like giant movement not really such a disruptive element that they had to make it so sluggish in normal play. The ambassador system being so tied to your giant’s available abilities feels like a complication point that slows things down even more, projects already rewarding enough with their plentiful boosts and many abilities already limited by how frequently they can be activated anyway. Randomness in your Aspect boosting is a real rough point, contending with human behaviors and developments feels like it is the point of challenge rather than hoping you might get the better boost and reloading if you didn’t since that can lead to wasted time. Despite all this, the gentle music and colorful world make for an experience that definitely has its hitching points, sometimes literally if the game starts chugging or crashes, but otherwise provides an interesting civilization cultivator. Little stories develop, you spend time plotting how you can meld things better next time, and ultimately it’s a desire to do more to keep being the guiding hand rather than a clenched fist over humanity that makes the limits feel restrictive rather than necessary parts of your strategic considerations.
Discovering and exploiting the synergies of Reus’s world is the heart of this god game and hence why it feels like its own quality is limited by the barriers it puts in place to restrict that process. Feeling stunted is different than not yet having important knowledge, the player surely needing to learn through experimentation that leads to mistakes as often as successes but also finding little quirks in the various systems that lead to complications you can’t plan around save for possibly tearing things down and hoping randomness favors you again. Trying to guide an entire world to do as you like is certainly going to be a bit rough, but there are going to be long stretches of involved work where you see the fruits of your labors and can revel in the payoff when you managed to guide things to go your way. Creating a world full of prosperous life isn’t easy and usually that’s a good thing in Reus, the learning process providing memorable highlights, strange surprises, and valuable info that can keep you playing even when you feel that friction of the systems that aren’t quite as conducive to the world building play.