Reus - The Game Review

Some people are scared to try out Indie Games, in fear of “wasting their money”, but Reus, developed by Abbey Games and published by SOEDESCO Publishing, is certainly worth the money spent.

           Reus starts out with an extremely long tutorial. If you pay attention to the tutorial and don’t skip through it, it can easily take upwards of two hours. While you can skip through the tutorial, it's not advised. There are many different commands, features, and button combinations that you wouldn’t be able to figure out without going through the tutorial.

           In Reus, you control the planet as different gods to create different land biomes and make the world habitable to people who will soon inhabit it. Throughout the game, one of your main goals is to keep the different “tribes” of people happy while also preventing them from waging war on each other. In the game, you can only control your gods (referred to by developers as “Giants”). The fate of the human population depends completely on your actions by controlling your giants – the player has no control over the humans.

           Throughout the game, you’ll need to provide the inhabitants of your planet with resources such as water, plants, and animals to keep them happy, but not too happy. Soon, your inhabitants will get greedy and begin waging war on each other to gain more resources, which isn’t the point of the game. Your goal is to keep everything balanced in your world for the duration of the round (rounds can be in 60, 90, or 120-minute durations).

           Reus was originally released in May 2013 for Microsoft Windows. It was then released on Linux and Mac in early 2014 and made it its final release on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in mid-October 2016. The average price across all platforms for Reus is $19.99/£15.67.

           Overall, while I did enjoy playing Reus, I felt that after a while the gameplay became stale and the outcomes of my different choices started becoming the same. If I was to give Reus a rating, it would be 3.7 out of 5 Stars.

The Game Developer, Abbey Games, provided a copy of this game for the sole purpose of conducting a review on the game.