izigame.me

Terra Nil is a nifty little puzzle game with a cute premise, but the content on offer falls too short to justify its 25€ price tag. At any other discounted price, it's worth checking out.
The game has the immediate advantage of malleability; the default difficulty settings are just presets which can be managed at will, and the game remains fun with or without resource management. There is no punishment for tailoring the difficulty either, which is welcome. The gameplay and mechanics are deliberately quite simple so there is not going to be much here for people who want more complex systems (don't expect Green Factorio) but it's nice to be able to sway the game towards a zen game or a more optimisation-focused puzzle.
There are a few perfectible spots however. Besides a handful of forgivable bugs (buildings being a bit tough to click sometimes and grids not disappearing), the main issue is readability: the game can get visually very busy and finding things in the environment can actually get tricky when you are past the stage of "make the brown parts green".
Additionally, the game's drip-feed approach to unlocks is frustrating at first. Having buildings unlock with each phase makes the game much easier to learn, but also causes more restarts and it would have been nice to have a "everything unlocked" option for repeated runs where you don't have to go through the paces to place certain buildings. The game was obviously designed with directed play rather than more freeform expression, but having the option for both would have been nice.
The weakest part of each level is by far the animal repopulation phase, in great part due to the game's readability problems. What the game expects you to do is to ping areas that fit each animal's criteria, but those criteria can be difficult to meet or to even understand due to wording and readability: it took me a long time to understand what the game wanted from me when an animals needs to be "in range of" something, or what even constitutes prey for certain animals. As such, repopulating feels more like a trial and error phase with a lot of fumbling.
If the game receives post-release content (and I certainly hope it does), my first wish is for the repopulation phase to be revamped into something more satisfying. Beyond that, it all depends on how much budget the development team can work with, but anything from custom scenarios to more biomes would be welcome.
In essence, it's a great little game with a lot of potential for further development. Price is a bit steep for how little content is on offer, but that can be remedied by either discounts or updates. If you aren't willing to fork the money now, definitely keep an eye on it.