izigame.me

I loved the demo of Terra Nil, but the actual game adds too many fiddly and annoying mechanics, killing my enjoyment at the second biome. First, the procedural generation should not be allowed to generate unwinnable maps on your first attempt at a biome. My first go at the second biome literally made an unwinnable map, which I didn't find out until I got to the second phase and learned that there were not enough cliffs to make jungle to satisfy the biome counter.
Secondly, difficulty settings need to let me actually address what makes the game annoying / difficult (which is not, in fact, the building cost):
- Changing the behavior of recyclers from the demo so that they can no longer recycle themselves is annoying and should be a difficulty option.
- Removing power limits on wind turbines should be a difficulty option.
- Removing the requirement to place certain buildings (eg. monorail nodes) on rocks should be a difficulty option.
Post-credits edit: So, I understand that part of the game is figuring out the right order to do things in; eg. on some maps you should go for X optional goal first, and Y biome first, because doing those first make doing other things easier. It wasn't actively _fun_ to discover that I should do these things in this order, though, because it felt like losing progress when I had to reset the map, especially since checking all the right boxes often felt more tedious than interesting.
I also wish that there was an option to view all buildings at once - very often I'd end up in a situation at the end of the map swapping between tabs repeatedly building a monorail pylon and a beacon. Lack of that UX polish is an added pebble in my shoe during the already uneven experience.
Ultimately I think the demo made me think this would be a very different, much more chill and less restrictive game than it actually is, and I would have appreciated a demo that actually demonstrated the level of "strategy" or attention to specific detail that the vast majority of the game requires.