What led to the collapse on Earth, and how do we avoid it in future? That’s the question that buzzes around the Cosmic Collective in BioEden, as they look to reclaim planets that have been turned into uninhabitable wastelands. It’s up to you, a chosen Keeper, to bring these world back to life, reintroducing wildlife, cleansing the lands, but doing so in an attentive and balanced way to ensure collapse doesn’t come again.
Rejuvenating a planet is a daunting task when it’s so thoroughly poisoned and corrupted as it is, but this is on the cosier end of management and colony building games. Regardless of the guild you choose – from the naturist Darwin guild to the mystical Umbra guild – your technology is very much up to the task, though for the demo and our hands on, we had to play with the starting guild, being guided through the game by Charles 12021809. He’s a happy looking robot.
You start with the placement of a biodome to house resurrected native creatures that will eventually inherit the worlds. They’re cute little creations from the team at Broken Arms Studio, and the Landowl is sure to be an instant hit, with a racoon or lemur like tail and body that blends into a colourfully feathered bird head. It’s easily the most adorable of the bunch, but all the Laghops, badger-like Bovvas and all the others are pretty sweet too.
The goal is pretty simple, to give each creature what they need to survive and to feel comfortable. The first species, the Laghops, just need a couple of bushes, some for cover and some for berries as food, and they’ll happily emerge from their artificial pods. That pod turns into a more natural looking rocky habitat as you meet the evolving requirements, and once you meet the final needs, they’ll happily breed and bring more life to the world. It’s a simple first species to manage, as you’d hope for, but things soon start to get a little trickier.
There’s a vulpine Vinex species that then needs the first to be within range – implying that, while not shown, they are their predators – and also demands water and trees. This then forces you to exit the contained view of the dome’s interior and look at the burning wasteland outside.
The landscape is red and spewing particles into the sky, the water pools are murky and toxic, there’s sludge like mounts of strange resources, and…. well, where do you even begin to clean all this up? That’s the overarching goal, but to start with you just need to find water, power and get your resource gathering lines up and running. Water just needs an extractor to be next to a body of water and it will do its thing, while power stations will put out the energy needed for other buildings, such as resource extractors that are placed directly on the colour coordinated materials. It can be a little tricky to spot resources in the world, but if you know which resource you need, you can find them, place the connecting power & water lines and get resources flowing.
The outside construction remains fairly simple as you gradually need to construct a research lab, a scanning tower to push back some of the fog, and then further research buildings to tap into ancient ruins. This is in aid of unlocking tiers on the tech tree, adding more flora and fauna, and more environmental devices into the mix.
You’ll need this research as more particular creatures become available to you. Different types of plantlife and food are needed, sure, but creatures that need warmer or colder climes with need climate control devices or humidifiers before they can thrive. That first habitat will start to look rather cluttered in short order, as animal territories start to overlap, and those microclimates can start to spill from one area to another. That’s why you build a second dome, a third dome and maybe more, dedicating them to the care of a particular biome and groups of animals.
There’s a nice progression through this first tutorial experience, but it does also hazard you not to overdo things. At the top of the screen in the world view is a meter showing how heavily you are exploiting the lands. Take things too far, build too much reclamation industry and you could end up triggering a fresh catastrophe.
In my time with BioEden, I was pretty far from managing to do so, but I did also find myself micromanaging the buildings that were in use. Resource gatherers in particular can quickly run through whatever is on their tile, making them redundant, and when you can recycle a building and get back 100% of the resource cost, it makes sense to deconstruct those gatherers and place them on the next nearest batch of materials to mine.
There’s not much pressure here for the casual building and animal management, and the requirements and the structured way in which you grow your resource gathering industry and exploration keep things nice and easy to grasp. BioEden takes a light touch to the genre, and that’s a big part of its charm.
