Terra Nil 4+

I LOVED this game!!! I thought I’d try again today, but they made some interface updates that aren’t great. For one thing, it doesn’t fit on my phone screen anymore so I can’t see all the interfaces because they get stuck under the buttons (even though this phone is bigger than the one I used to play last year). Also, some aspects of the game don’t seem to work (for example, I can’t start fires). I do love that this great game got some more development attention; I just don’t think it was tested well enough before release.

I’ve played the first version multiple times, and despite its glitches, I had become addicted to the beauty and simplicity of the game. However, all of this time to wait for a new update with new content and there’s only one new animal? I was let down. The new levels are fun but the animals are just repeated ones from the other continents. Having Boar on 3/4 regions was redundant. There are so many other species that could have been used instead. (Tapirs, Caiman, Capybara with the Jaguar level would have fit well as an example) Also pandas? In the tropical island with the South American animals? That made no sense at all as pandas aren’t even on the same continent as Flamingos and Jaguars. It took away from the suspended belief of the game. The glitches are also now more persistent, with the animal bar opening up repeatedly even when you didn’t mean to highlight an animal. The game also lags constantly and zooms in to the fullest at random. The Abandoned Quarry level also doesn’t let you complete the Temperate region to 100%, as even if you unlock the Beavers in the level, it still shows up at the end that you didn’t, thus you can never complete the game. Also the bonus levels from the previous version are now just regular levels. Because the game’s glitch makes it so you can never fully finish it, it is unknown if there are actually more levels as a bonus after you complete the game.

This is the kind of game that’s right up my alley. Calm and quiet, animals and natural scenes, restoring beauty to a wasteland…all of that. But the game is so buggy as to be unplayable. It crashes constantly, sometimes within seconds of loading my saved game even on the lowest settings. Would love to play more but I actually can’t.

Edit: was hoping the recent “bug fix and stability” update would help. But now I can’t even load my saved game. Thought I’d see if this was available on PC and it was! BUT, reading the Steam reviews, apparently that version is just as buggy if not more. Resulting in CPU overheats, BSODs, and other failures. Yikes! I’m not downloading that.

The graphics and gameplay aren’t complex. My devices aren’t that old. If I had to guess, the coding is overwritten and inefficient as to be causing such a high drain on resources and I don’t think this game can update its way out of that.