Terra Nil is a strategy video game that lets you return Mother Nature to its glorious self. Developed by vfqd, elyaradine, and TheJunt, this unique city-builder game focuses on ecosystem reconstruction rather than the classic city-building game mechanics you'd typically find in games like SimCity. Instead of houses and buildings, you are tasked with populating a barren wasteland using plants, flowers, and animals. However, you still need to make use of manmade tools to restore the greenery.

Reclaim the wasteland

Terra Nil is a subversion of the usual resource-gathering for the city builder genre. Unlike the original, wherein you sometimes have to harvest the local resources for your city construction and even possibly damage the surrounding environment this way, this game allows you to grow back those precious resources. You are given a procedurally generated piece of land that’s virtually dead, and you must strategize on where to place advanced machines to start regrowing the ecosystem.

You start with a simple flat plateau. It's important to note that the chosen difficulty affects the building costs. You earn currency by creating greenery using the six tools available. You must place a turbine for electricity, a toxic scrubber to cleanse the surrounding wasteland, and a greenhouse to plant the greenery and earn back more currency. The other three tools are for unlocking more places to put a turbine on.

This is because there are only three types of tiles available first: poisoned soil, dry riverbeds, and rocks—and you can only put turbines on rocks, which are few on the map. With proper strategizing, however, you can easily create more and eventually reclaim the land with verdant greenery, completing the level. Other maps offer more advanced tiers of machines, and you need to plan wisely to reach the required percentage of greenery.

In addition to the basic river valley that all players will start off with, you can also unlock regions such as a desolate island, a volcanic glacier, and a post-apocalyptic city left victim to flooding. Each area will have its own set of goals that you need to achieve in order to restore them. They will also have their own unique set of fauna and flora that you can watch over, as well.

A unique experience

Overall, Terra Nil is a fresh take on a beloved strategy genre. Not only does it have easy controls and a relaxing ambiance with its audio, but its pixelated art is beautiful, as well. The environments come alive with weather systems and animals, too. Its only major issue is that it doesn’t have a tutorial, even for the controls—as there are camera controls on the keyboard that you can’t perform with the mouse.