Growth

Review

After starting Growth for the first time, you will have to play the Tutorial from the main menu screen before you can move on to the game because the play button is greyed out. The tutorial will take you over the basics of the game; it isn’t very big, so you’ll soon be in the game playing away to your heart’s content.

The game is played out on hexagonal areas, in total you have eight areas to complete, with each area divided into many hexagonal tiles. The first area you play is in the centre, with the other six areas surrounding the centre.  The eighth area will become visible once you have completed the seven previous areas.

You complete an area by uncovering 100 % points of interest on the map and habitats. You begin at a habitat in the centre of an area, with a few uncovered tiles surrounding you. You will have to pay attention to these coloured tiles as they are key to unlocking new habitats and allow you to spread out and unlock the area. The tiles are covered in a fog of war, so you uncover the tiles by moving animals.

Each tile represents a landscape and the tiles come in different colours and types. Grouping multiple tiles together creates what’s called a habitat, and when you control a habitat, there’ll be a white line around it. You can then use this habitat to move out and explore.  Your starting point in the centre is your fist habitat, from which you can see the coloured tiles; sending an animal to a coloured tile will uncover surrounding tiles and allow you to unlock the habitat hidden below the fog of war.

Unlocking and adding habitats will put extra animals to your inventory. You will need to collect as many animals as possible if you are to move forward and complete the game because if you run out of animals then it will be game over and you will have to start a brand-new game.

The animals you have are deer, boars, bees, ducks and goats. To begin with you only have deer and boar. The deer is the more common of the two and you will gain more deer when the habitats are a certain size.  You will earn boars once adding to a habitat of a bigger size. A deer can only move a certain number of tiles while a boar can move more tiles. Deer and boars can only be used from the forest habitats, however if you link different habitats, such as connecting a forest habitat with a goat’s mountain range, then you can use either a deer, boar or goat from those connected habitats. This can be very helpful at times, but it can eat through your animals, so beware.

The other animals can help you across different types of habitats; goats can move across mountain ranges, bees from the meadow habitats can move across areas of water, and ducks will allow you to move further afield.

Once you have cleared the first area, you get to choose which of the six surrounding areas you want to visit next. However, instead of starting from the centre of the area, you will make your way from the first area into the new area using the animals and habitats at your disposal.

You may notice that there are some structures which protrude through the fog of war. Visiting these points of interest will unlock them, which will give you extra animals as well as a bonus animal, all of which can be used to help unlock things on the map. The new animals are bats, birds and beavers. Bats can reveal hidden obstacles in the area, birds can scout and uncover an area, while the beaver can remove a tile such as mountain and transfer it to wasteland, although it cannot do anything against lava ridges.

The graphics in Growth are great and the game runs extremely well; I had no problems playing the game at all.

So far, I have only managed to reach the eighth area once and confront the volcano, which did catch me out in regards to how I was supposed to take it on.  Naturally, I failed after running out of animals.

I have thoroughly enjoyed playing Growth.  It is quite challenging, but that is always good in my book. It doesn’t take long to play a game from start to finish (or in my case, to fail). A game can take five minutes to an hour depending on what happens, and you can save it at any point.

Each new game is procedurally generated so that you don’t know the layout underneath the fog of war.

In the settings you will find options for Video (Full Screen, Resolution, V-Sync and FPS Limit), Audio (Master, Music, Ambience, Sound Effects and UI Volume Sliders), Gameplay (Auto Save Tick Box and Auto Save Interval Time Limit), and Language (English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portugues, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean).  

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

Growth Steam Store Page