Let's get this green party started!
EVOPOLLUTIONEvopollution is a game about pollution, the environment, and polluting the environment. The Evo part is, I assume, a reference to mutating the crap out of wildlife with pollution, but I'll get to that later.
Basically the game is a puzzler in the vein of old city builders like Caesar III. Like Caesar III, you place buildings down on a map, and each building exerts some kind of area effect - in this case, pollution or... "environment," which is a kind of hokey anti-pollution quackery. Unlike Caesar III however, this game sucks.
I skipped the tutorial because manuals are for chumps, but the game in "expert" mode gave me zero direction or goal for the map I was on. You start with a blank field, a sum of money, and your instant-build menu. There's a cash total at the top that you use to build... eh... I can't say power generators, but you build buildings that make you money in exchange for a "pollution" rating. There's solar panels, wind turbines, oil derricks, a gas refinery, and my favorite: nuclear power plant. There's also completely worthless auxilliary buildings that supposedly generate money based on how many of X type of primary buildings you have, but they're shit.
You can cancel out a pollution rating by planting "environmental" items. There are two items in this category: "tree" and "big tree." Neither one of them does anything at all, that I could see. I think you're supposed to fit as many buildings and trees and crap on the map as you can for some reason.
But that's elf-talk. Let's burn stuff!
As your pollution levels rise, the grass dies around your factories and the trees wither. This happens almost immediately, in what's presumably a half-hour or so in-game. Planting trees may reverse the effect, but doing so takes days. So I decided to see how toxic I could make the entire map.
Turns out, not very. My first plant was a Gas refinery, which turned most of my map into a deathly wasteland in about 4 seconds. See attached image:
Next I built the oil derrick off to the left in the picture there. The derrick wasn't enough to go straight Fallout on the wasteland-scale, but... its area of effect overlapped with the refinery just enough to make a zone of pixelated hell.
You see, in the world of Evopollution, pollution is a toxic, reality-warping eldritch horror. Those little fireball-looking things in the screenshot are the fragments of a meteor called down on my zone of overpollution.
Yes, I polluted SO BAD from that refinery and one oil derrick that the cosmos themselves decided to purge my map in righteous cleansing fire. Only in that one little strip, though. It also calls down other "disasters" like lightning strikes and giant smiley-faced Sandworms, which I assume are mutants as stated earlier.
The gas must flow.
Even better was the nuclear plant. Its pollution rating is so eX-treme! that it pollutes the entire map to a medium rating. This was awesome, because two seconds after building it the whole map was covered in a meteor shower lightning storms and what presumably would have been Sandworm-nados or whale-tsunamis or something. Unfortunately, less than 5 seconds after building the nuclear plant was completed, a meteor struck it and caused an explosion that destroyed it and my gas refinery. The unleashed radiation flooded the entire map and instantly regrew all the grass and trees that the gas refinery had withered. I assume it also gave the sandworms eight legs and two heads or something, but they never showed up again. Probably plotting their overthrow of the bourgeoisie in their commie mineshafts.
At this point the nuclear catastrophe wiped out my bank account, so I decided to take a break. However, the save game option doesn't work. Instead it beeps at you as if to say "lol u srs?", so I guess that's the end of my time with Evopollution.
Pros:The formula used could have made a decent puzzler, given a lot more polish and love. However...
Cons:It feels like an abandoned pre-alpha tech demo. The interface sucks and is hard to read. There's no way to see pollution ratings at a glance and trees are woefully underpowered in their nature-magic quackery skill. There could easily have been a competitive mode where you try to find the most efficient way to gather cash and drop a power-plant-pocalypse onto your opponent's map. But there's not.
The Verdict:1/10. At least make your damn savegame feature work before you ship. Have some pride.
Sengoku is likely going to take me a while to wrap my brain around. I'm gonna tackle it tomorrow and see how it goes.
Author
Topic: Sappho's “Happy” New Year Blowout Giveaway - Videos On Their Way! (Read 26832 times)