This Is the Best Citybuilder You’ve Never Played

Citybuilders are a unique genre—spanning the gamut between 4X and Real-Time-Strategy games, they require both forethought and planning skills, often tasking players with expanding their empire to gain resources and dominion over enemies or other players. Terra Nil does the opposite. Instead of commandeering the resources of the land to expand and grow, Terra Nil asks the player to restore a wasteland to its natural beauty. Using various restorative building types, players foster regrowth and revitalize the world to catalogue the animal species that thrive there.

Terra Nil Offers a Charming Citybuilder Experience

Many citybuilders are based on conquest, but Terra Nil is the opposite. The buildings players are offered include ground purifiers, wind turbines, and toxin scrubbers in lieu of barracks, town halls, and factories, lending themselves well to a more relaxing time. While there’s no warfare, no need to balance a trade economy, and no need to make allies, Terra Nil offers challenges of its own.

The main task of the game is restoring the land, but it doesn’t stop there. After the landscape has been restored to its former glory, players must manage the environment to suit the various animals that make the new flora their home. Between frogs, bears, wolves, deer, beavers, and more, keeping each animal species happy is a challenge that’s both satisfying and tricky, and takes careful planning from the outset to ensure each species’ needs are met.

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There’s only one resource in the game to manage, which can be spent on various buildings and is earned by adequately purifying and restoring the wasted landscape. Each level starts with an arid, polluted area for the player to restore to its former beauty, and each environment is a delicate balancing act of different types of plant and animal life. Despite only including one currency to worry about, Terra Nil doesn’t shy away from offering a challenge and even higher levels of difficulty for those who desire them.

Adaptive Difficulty Makes Terra Nil for Everyone

At its base difficulty, “Ecologist,” Terra Nil offers a balanced but slightly challenging experience. For those with citybuilder experience, planning the organization of the restorative effort ahead of time is the main challenge, something that’s necessary to adequately adapt to the needs of the various animals that make the newly-restored map their home. However, accomplishing this task might be too easy for the more seasoned 4X and citybuilder enjoyers. Thankfully, Terra Nil offers five different difficulty levels, all catering to different levels of play. They range from “Monk” to “Environmental Engineer,” even offering a fifth “Custom” option that lets the player choose their own difficulty settings.

Each level offers something different, changing the starting amount of currency and various other settings, including how difficult it is to reach certain objective thresholds. Another setting allows the player to reduce the cost of buildings, while still another enables players to recycle unneeded buildings when they’re running low on resources. Some other toggles include a tutorial, tooltips, contextual hints, and even a Zen Mode if the player isn’t feeling up for the challenge. The customizable difficulty settings are just one of the many things that make Terra Nil worth playing; in addition to being a great game, it’s still getting updates.

Two Years After Release, Terra Nil Still Thrives

Terra Nil was originally released in 2023 and peaked at just over four thousand players on Steam that same year. Since then, it’s maintained a few hundred players; however, despite its low player count, it’s still getting semi-regular updates and even free DLC to keep the game engaging even two years after it came out. Its newest update, a DLC called Heatwave, includes four new scenarios for players to try out for free, and has brought back around a thousand players to the game despite dwindling interest over time.

Terra Nil is a masterpiece of a game, perfect for anyone too intimidated by 4X games like Stellaris or overwhelmed by beefier citybuilders like Frostpunk. It offers a balanced experience that encourages players to appreciate the beauty of the landscape they work so hard to cultivate. Despite low player counts, this little citybuilder truly is worth the time, offering around ten to twelve hours of gameplay experience and pretty expansive replayability. It’s often on sale, making it a great game to grab for a cozy night in or a break from something stressful.