Terra Nil Review (Switch eShop)

Video games are usually based on a power fantasy. We wish we could slay the dragon, overthrow the evil king, or run faster than any hedgehog ever should. Possibly the biggest power fantasy of all, though, is offered by Terra Nil, which allows you to tackle the overwhelming existential dread of climate change.

In Terra Nil, you are given a simple task – repair a ruined, barren planet, coaxing plants and animals back to the surface until the world is teeming with life once more. It is a beautifully simple concept that is almost perfectly executed by developer Free Lives. It takes a fine touch to turn one of the most stressful topics in our world into a genuinely relaxing interactive experience, but this is a wonderfully balanced game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do and never feels repetitive.

The planet you have been sent to restore has four distinct regions that need to be repaired. This is done by detoxifying the land and water, planting grass, and then diversifying the biomes. Later levels require you to adjust the climate, raising and lowering the temperature or the humidity to allow different forms of life to thrive, but it never becomes a terribly complicated endeavour. The resources you use to purchase new machines are plentiful and easy to recover. Only once in our ten hours with the game did we need to restart an area because we had made too many silly mistakes.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t have to start over a few times, though. Unfortunately, the Switch version of the game is more unstable than we expected. It crashed several times while we were playing it, once taking about an hour of progress with it and forcing us to restart from the very first map. This, combined with some frame rate issues and problems with getting the recycle drone to navigate properly, keeps Terra Nil from being a must-play title on Switch.

Even with these issues, we found it difficult to tear ourselves away from the game. It plays like most city-builder strategy games. You need to plan how you place your power sources and how you position your machines to try to alter the most area. There are four regions to restore in the main game, each one building on the mechanics introduced in the previous one. The main challenge becomes space – fitting all the different biomes into the limited areas. Certain buildings require access to fresh water or must be built on a cliffside, forcing you to plan further ahead as you go along.

Once you’ve restored the biomes of each map, you need to scan to see which fauna have returned thanks to your efforts. This is probably the most interesting puzzle in the game because each animal requires a different environment to thrive. Bears, for example, only live on a hilltop with a forest and a beehive, which means altering your carefully designed environment to attract the animal. Trying to make a world where every creature can thrive is a delicate balancing act but it is incredibly satisfying once you’ve found the right layout.

However, the most rewarding part of the mission comes at the end when you clean up the last bits of equipment from the map, recycling it to allow you to remove any evidence of your actions from the planet’s surface. Though the recycling drone got stuck in some of the waterways we had built, slowing down our efforts considerably, watching the final turbine be packed away into our airship was the perfect message to end with. Nature thrives without human involvement, after all.

Even at higher difficulty levels, Terra Nil is not a particularly hard game. Those looking for a challenge won’t find it here, but that approachability is intentional. It will take most people around eight hours to complete the game’s four base maps, plus an additional two or three to complete the optional variants that are unlocked when you have cleansed the planet. There isn’t a huge amount of content here and a couple of extra maps would have helped make it a more attractive purchase. Aside from the instability of the console port, our biggest complaint about Terra Nil is that we simply wanted more of it.

The developers have said that a patch to fix some of these problems, including frame rate issues in the Flooded City region and issues when placing particularly large buildings, is in the works, but it hadn’t been released while we played Terra Nil in the two weeks post-release. It’s a shame because the visuals have a wonderful attention to detail to them. Watching the deer graze in the fields or the crabs scuttle along the sandy beaches is a visual reminder of your mission. You can watch each barren wasteland slowly but surely return to life before your eyes.

Terra Nil is one of the most relaxing city-building simulators we’ve gotten our hands on. Everything from the ambient noise of the birds to the light soundtrack that plays in the background gives the game a wonderfully chilled vibe. The short length left us wanting just a bit more and those looking for a real challenge should look elsewhere, but the game manages to deliver its environmental message with minimal text or dialogue. It is just a shame that the multiple crashes and performance issues ruined the mood and keep the Switch version from being the definitive edition of this fantastic title.

Conclusion

Despite its technical flaws and short gameplay, we found ourselves unable to put down Terra Nil on Switch. The simple act of rebuilding a broken and polluted world is so satisfying and well-crafted. From the moment you put down your first wind turbine to watching your airship remove any evidence of your hard work, the game gives you a sense of hope for our own climate crisis without needing to explicitly say a word. This is pure relaxation in video game form and is worth picking up, particularly once that promised first patch is rolled out.