I would hope that I could be considered an environmentally friendly person; I recycle, I try to buy responsibly and I thought that Imagine Earth might help me promote an eco-friendly viewpoint to the internet.
Wrong.
Nothing against the developer Serious Brothers, but the demo released back in April 2012 doesn’t give me much hope for the full version. Nevertheless, try it yourself on Steam.
The controls are weird-click and drag with the left mouse button? Maybe it’s from years of playing The Sims, but I couldn’t stop myself from constantly doing the wrong thing. The graphics are iffy, there is little detail and while there may be more available in the full game, I can’t see any version of me that would part with my hard-earned cash to continue playing.
The game revolves around you creating a civilization on various planets through building City Centers and Districts, along with the means to create the necessary resources your inhabitants will require: power and food.
The game makes it difficult to see what is happening at any given time, you either have to be zoomed in, and then when you hover over any toolkit items you get an annoying pop up taking up half the screen or you need better graphics that Blizzard Head Office.
It’s difficult to know what to do at any given time, the Mission’s log is somewhat uninformative and vague and half the time you build stuff just for something to do.
The resources work in a Similar way to Warcraft 3, build farms for food, etc. But that is where the similarities end, there’s no fighting, no battles, no real feeling of progression you get in other Simulation games.
But build too many Coal Plants, or destroy too many patches of forest and you bring the wrath of Global Warming. While it is Super Serial in real life, meh, I couldn’t care less in-game. In the end I wanted to see all those smiley faces of my towns turn to sad ones. And then burn.
Or get ripped apart by tornados.
