If you subscribe to the So Many Games Newsletter, you’ll likely be aware of my love and adoration for Lionhead Studios’ Black & White 2 – a game in which you take on the role of a god who manages and maintains a settlement, all while teaching morals to a titan.
When I first saw the trailer for Reus 2, I was immediately drawn in by its premise – take your titans, shape worlds and build civilisation from the wasteland. It’s a promising concept, but one that also takes on a surprising twist – unlike conventional city-building games, there is an element of puzzle-solving, requiring you to develop and place resources to create equilibrium – it feels more akin to a roguelike, where each planet is a new opportunity to build, grow and synergise – that is, if you can stop the different cities from warring with one another!
Gameplay generally revolves around completing objectives for the different factions you settle in the world, terraforming sections of your planet and adding the flora and fauna produced by one of your three titans. As you progress further into the game, you are encouraged to remove and rebuild these objects with ever-growing resources, each of which can have differing effects based on their proximity to other items. This also means being wary of restrictions on what can be placed, as well as how it affects the different factions.
As new settlers arrive, you are able to choose their general motivation, such as preferring food over gold or favouring research over everything else. This in turn also impacts where you choose to settle them, as the biomes and the objects placed within them can drastically change how each city grows. On paper, this loop is fairly satisfying – build, expand, and develop new resources; upgrade your settlements; and send the occasional tsunami to remind warring factions to behave themselves.
Reus 2 has plenty of promise in concept alone, which is why I was disappointed to find that the game opts to overcomplicate this – the main resources you need to develop should be easily understood on a surface level, with gold, food and science being required in equilibrium, but as you progress, the different resources and the needs of settlers suddenly begin to feel overwhelming; the different synergies required make the game feel more of an exercise in spreadsheet management than gameplay.
Though my personal experience with this has been unfavourable, it would be remiss of me not to mention the broad community that has already grown around the first Reus as well as its sequel on PC – it has constantly been praised for its leanings towards a roguelike that blends city-building with careful management, including a large and supportive community of players eager to ease others into the game – this doesn’t alleviate the need for a long and arduous start to get used to the gameplay loop but makes it feel remarkably more friendly.
If you decide to pick up Reus 2, it’s clear that engaging with the community is an important step to enjoying the game, but the platform you choose to play on can also prove vital, particularly given how rough the edges are on the Nintendo Switch edition of the game, in which navigating UI elements and placing objects in the world can be needlessly difficult – the game definitely favours a mouse-and-keyboard gameplay style, but hopefully this can be fixed in a later patch.
Gameplay aside, Reus 2 succeeds in sheer style – with a soundtrack brimming with soft, often calming music, the game oozes charm in the way it delivers everything – the titans you control are stunningly unique, each biome and the flora and fauna within are given a charming form and function, and the bright colour palette makes the vivid world stand out further. It took me some time and a reasonable amount of research to fully enjoy Reus 2, but it sits perfectly in a niche of players who will engage fully with its world thanks to its extensive, almost limitless potential for creative problem solving.
