As a big fan of the god game genre back on the PC a few decades ago, I really enjoyed the Populous series and even the flawed likes of Black and White. A little different than city-building simulators and the like, the focus on trying to develop a world that people would live in and respond to was always pretty interesting. Of course, it feels like for the most part the genre was lost to time for quite a while, popping up periodically perhaps, but not being seen too much. Now, with the release of Reus 2, it has been curious to return to the genre after so much time, but at least in terms of the experience on the Switch I’m not sure how well it has turned out.

In Reus 2, you’ll end up taking indirect control of world-building, working through your giant elemental avatars to help mold the world, trying to help humanity thrive. Think of it mostly as trying to set the groundwork for mankind’s success, learning and experimenting to discover what works and what doesn’t, and then hoping to see things evolve in a positive direction. Where it gets tricky is that while there are multiple ways your people can be successful, if you aren’t careful they can also get turned around in a negative direction as well if the natives aren’t happy. You’ll then have the means to either correct or remove the negative behavior through more cataclysmic means, but unless you’re simply in the mood to see what happens when you begin destroying everything you can always hope it won’t turn ugly.

There were some areas where I found this port to be a real challenge though. The first is with the UI and controls, which feel like there were some valiant attempts to make them appropriate for a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard, but that I’d consider cumbersome. It’s one of those things where you can catch onto them, but they never feel intuitive as you try to stumble around through control groups, and sometimes struggle to tell which one you’re even in. Even with a fair amount of god game experience I also didn’t feel like I walked away from the tutorials grasping important concepts for being successful. Granted, the goal of games like this is to allow people to discover what works best for themselves, but too often my decisions felt a bit arbitrary and I was struggling to identify whether what I was doing was really on the right track or not, making it hard to learn from mistakes or successes when I couldn’t generally tell the difference. There’s an interesting game here, but expect to need to show some patience, and perhaps look up some game guides to make it easier to get rolling with.