Humble Choice (April 2024): Terraformers
Come terraform my cold red heart, spaceman!
It’s no secret that I’ve been a little uninspired by the whole Humble Choice thing lately. At this point I’ve probably racked up enough Steam Codes to let me happily play games until I die of old age, and it’s getting harder and harder to be inspired enough to get out a review. So imagine my surprise when the game I picked to take a quick look at for this month’s offering (just so that Krikket wasn’t left reviewing all the games herself) turned out not to result in an hour brushing the surface of a middle-of-the-road 4X game with a theme I’d seen dozens of times before, but to be the result of a dangerous number of late nights trapped in the ‘Just One More Turn’ battle with a classy puzzle-like experience that was exactly what I needed in my life right now.
Terraformers is a turn-based strategy game about starting a colony on an inhospitable red planet. I was drastically misinformed: it doesn’t play like a 4X at all (and doesn’t technically fit the definition either, since there’s no eXtermination), but more like a single player board-game experience, just you and your deck of tricks up against a planet that is trying to kill you. In each individual turn you can’t do all that much: you receive an income, the get a random choice of buildings you could build to add to your hand, decide whether to build any buildings or new settlements that you can afford or fit in your colony or to save your precious resources and adjacency bonuses for something else, and perform a leader-specific action that is usually exploration. There’s a few (ok, quite a few) extra bells and whistles bolted on, but that’s the core gameplay loop that occupies almost all of your time.
If this sounds like every colony-building game you’ve ever played, you’re not all that wrong, but the pieces here just come together with the satisfaction of a well-maintained, air-tight agri-dome. As I finished my first play-through I found myself thinking “well, that was great, but I think I’ve worked it out now, and I doubt it has much replay value”, but now, 13 hours of play time and five campaigns later, I am pleased to report that I has seriously underestimated this little title. Not only are there a number of different overarching targets to achieve on the different missions, there’s a rogue-like system of drip-fed unlocks of new leaders and buildings and a difficulty dial that goes ALL the way up, fueled by increasing demands for satisfaction from your population and an increasing number of out-of-the-blue challenges that will be a big distraction from your primary objectives. Yes, I could (and probably will) spend a lot of time with this one, and all with the satisfying ease of a turn-based strategy game that I can dip in and out of as child- and self-care demands require.
It won’t be a perfect experience for everyone the whole way through. The map is a little unclear at times (give me my Civ V strategy view!), the randomness of the ‘card-deck’ of colony improvements can be frustrating, not having save feature other than 'Save and Quit’ takes some getting used to, and there comes a time towards the end of most campaigns where you’re rolling in resources and it just becomes a drawn-out fight against the clock rather than a skin-of-your-teeth experience, but these weaknesses haven’t added up to enough to mark this one down for me yet.
All-in-all, Terraformers has a huge thumbs-up from me. If you’re at all interested in the theme or this style of game, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. Each turn has so few decisions to make that pressing the ‘End Turn’ button just feels like it takes no time at all. “Oooh, a spaceport, I’ve been looking for one of those! I’ll build it and that habitation block now, then use my exploration to grab a few more bits of titanium, and next turn I’ll finally be able to expand and build that nitrate mine that I’ve had my eye on, and maybe if I get lucky with my next leader I’ll have a chance to start working on that asteroid mining project…”