A millennium after mankind’s near-extinction, a few sleeping “Emissaries” of the old world rise from the ashes of the apocalypse in an attempt to reunite humanity and begin again. Revival: Recolonization, developed by HeroCraft PC, retells the familiar story of Civilization, but set on an Earth that’s now alien and starring a humanity that can no longer take their environment for granted.
“Ok,” says you, “so Alpha Centauri.” No. Well, ok, sort of. There are elements of Alpha Centauri here, from the themes of the game to customizing unit equipment. But that’s hardly all: the strategic layer is very Age of Wonders – you’ll quickly notice a layout similar to Planetfall’s sectors, and interacting with the natives is quite a bit like AoW4’s free cities. And, of course, the shadow of Civilization can’t be ignored: you’ll lay out city districts to exploit different tile bonuses and move through four “Ages” of technology: Bows beget Crossbows which themselves beget Muskets, then Rifles, then Automatic Rifles, then Lasers.
Barbarians have been replaced by AI robots because, of course, it was AI that destroyed everyone. In fact, one of the victory conditions is to prove yourself worthy to the “All-Mind,” an omniscient super AI that may be responsible for genetically engineering the surviving humans to suffer more immediate consequences for not staying in their lane and respecting their environment.
Fortunately, for the purposes of rebuilding civilization, you’re one of those aforementioned Emissaries equipped with a techno-magic staff that both keeps you from aging and allows you to do everything from altering the climate to reducing mountains to rubble. You can also do more exotic things like irradiate areas, change gravity, or cause an acidic rainstorm.
The Lazarus Reflex
It turns out this magical stick is incredibly handy to have around when humanity can no longer survive outside of their “home” environment. Upon meeting your first clan, which will graciously offer to surrender the role of supreme ruler to your Emissary immediately, you’ll discover they’re listed as a “People of the Grasslands” or Tunda, Deserts, Savannahs, and so on. You’ll also note a randomly selected bundle of tags that define their culture, dictate bonuses and penalties, and set default diplomatic stances once you meet other clans. A Pacifistic clan won’t have a rosy outlook on a band of warmongering murderers, for instance. Granted, I’m not sure who would.
Agreeing to lead them lets you build your first city, where you’ll immediately discover exactly how important the environment has become. In Revival, the climate is broken into five temperature bands: from chilly to warm, the terrain is either Cold, Cool, Temperate, Hot, or Desert. The first clan you agree to lead becomes your budding nation’s chosen climate and is locked in stone from then on. This choice will have profound ramifications on the rest of your game.
For example, if you’re leading a Temperate clan, Temperate terrain will grant you the total listed amount of resources from the tile. Any other terrain will grant no natural resources by default. Building districts on foreign-climate terrain will grant the district’s base amount of resources, but districts also provide a multiplier to the number of natural resources on the tile, meaning you’re potentially leaving a lot on the table.
Climate applies to units as well. If a Temperate clan unit stands in Temperate terrain, they’ll heal 1 HP per turn. Standing in Cool or Hot will cause healing to stop. Cold or Desert won’t heal either, but it will reduce your movement points by one. In combat, “extreme” terrain is even worse: it will actually damage your unit by 1 hit point per combat turn in addition to the movement point penalty! Fortunately, this damage can’t kill on its own, but it can easily make the difference in a fight with the modest hit-point values used in Revival.
Finally, the climate isn’t random in Revival. You’re still on Earth, so climate bands exist a gradient of climates running from extreme cold at the poles to sweltering heat around the equator. Fortunately, maps feature wraparound in both the east-west and north-south directions to make sure nations that start near the poles aren’t totally screwed out of contiguous land while at the same time maintaining realistic proportions of extreme regions.
Having a choice in climate means, in theory, you can choose a climate ideal to the type of strategy you’re pursuing. For instance, extreme climates allow for more peaceful or defensive approaches as only one other climate type can enter their lands without suffering consequences. The downside is that the inverse is also true: conquering the world is going to be tough when three of every five climates are ready and waiting to kill you.
Unfortunately, for the time being, your Emissary spawns in a random location on the map, so you’re either limited to grabbing whatever’s closest or losing several turns of progression on a very risky walk to whatever climate you want to lead. The latter is not advised – with no other means of dealing damage, a stray run-in with a hostile will end your game before it begins. So there’s certainly room for improvement on the game setup front.
Speaking of stray run-ins with hostiles, let’s talk expansion – how it happens, how it works, and the consequences around it.
Public Works and Popularity Contests
Revival’s map is divided into large pre-defined regions, much like Sectors in Planetfall. Regions are defined entirely by the presence of a clan and essentially represent the borders of a clan’s territory. Ergo, each region has one and only one clan in it, represented by a single camp. Also note that, like Planetfall, region borders will never change – they’re set at the game’s start and immutable.
Rarely can a wonder of the old world be found in a region. You may, for instance, find the Statue of Liberty on a lonely beach and feel strangely compelled to strike the sand and damn them all to hell. Or, like me, you might find the Eiffel Tower near the South Pole. Rationalizing how it got there intact is an exercise left to the reader; the critical bit is these unnatural wonders can grant their regions some unique and often quite powerful bonuses.
There are no settlers in Revival, nor are there any empty regions. To expand, you must either vassalize or integrate the region’s clan into your larger nation, at which point the region flips from neutral to belonging to your nation. Though a clan can be wooed by multiple different nations at once, when a nation chooses to integrate it the clan is set in stone as theirs short of conquest (or possibly region trading – though I personally didn’t see the option to do so in the Early Access version).
Basically, nations race to be the first to impress a neutral clan enough to forsake all others and join a specific Emissary. This race is tracked by points called “Loyalty.” It’s essentially the same system as Age of Wonders 4’s Free Cities. You don’t need a sufficient lead like Civilization 5; you just need to cross a finish line first and spend some Prosperity, a meta-resource similar to Influence or Imperium in other games, to perform the Integration.
Gaining loyalty is actually pretty interesting. First, much like your nation’s founding clan, every clan has a climate it likes and some tags that explain its values as a culture. Having a common climate preference or culture trait tags gives you a healthy initial boost to Loyalty – possibly enough to Vassalize, but almost never enough to Integrate immediately. Of course, having incompatible tags gives you a penalty, increasing by just how incompatible they are: an Arctic clan trying to woo a Tundra clan may only have a slightly harder time doing so, but trying to peacefully woo a Desert clan might be right off the table.
But what about the in-between cases, where a pair isn’t clearly meant to be but could meet halfway? There are actually several different systems that enter the scene at this point. First, each clan has basic preferences and aversions toward certain actions defined by their culture tags. As a simple example, a clan of murderers is likely to respect you more if you settle disputes with lethal force too. But if you’re the type to talk first, they’ll likely decide you’re better off as prey.
A second option, with deceptively long-term consequences, is the use of Oaths. Every clan is interested in the impossible goal of being part of a bigger nation while also maintaining their individual character. Recognizing this dilemma, clans are willing to prioritize and will present their non-negotiable values and goals as options for you to swear an Oath to.
These Oaths can vary wildly. Some are quest-like: terraform their territory in a specific way, chase off some robots, or build a number of military units in a certain number of turns. Others are more policy-oriented: don’t use acid weapons, integrate new clans by force and not diplomacy, or don’t tear down city ruins in their territory. Some oaths last forever; some have more (or less) reasonable durations or deadlines.
In a nice twist, simply swearing an Oath will instantly grant you standing with that clan, though this may take several turns to trickle down to the on-the-ground opinion that is Loyalty. This allows you to, well, lie: promising the world and delivering none of it can still win over the clan and cause Integration.
There are of course consequences for doing this; the city you build in the clan territory still counts as that clan and will suffer major approval penalties as promises become lies. However, right now, that fact is a bit too opaque to the player and can be extremely hard to keep track of using the tools available. I’m also not convinced the consequences are severe enough – the power of denying an enemy a territory, even if it’s completely unproductive under your control, is too strong to ignore.
The third option is the intermediate state of Vassalization. If a clan likes you but isn’t convinced it loves you yet, they’re often willing to become your vassals for protection. This unlocks advanced diplomatic options, including options to increase loyalty further, and tentatively flags the region as yours, denoted by a hashed border of your color.
This doesn’t mean the race is won, but if Vassalization occurs peacefully, it nearly clinches it: the only way the clan will turn away from their liege is if they develop a deeply negative opinion about them, which outside players can’t influence. It’s possible – even easy – to flip recently conquered clans, but next to impossible to flip willing vassals.
And the fourth and final option is a classic: just kill them and take their stuff. Given the fact independent clans don’t do research of their own, this gets increasingly easier as time goes on. And broken bodies have less approval consequences than broken promises.
Any of these options leads to a clan eventually agreeing to integrate with your nation, enabling you to build a new city in their territory using your Emissary. While this does mean there are a finite number of city spots, there are generally enough territories to go around, and climate preferences ensure a rather even distribution of potential city spots at the outset.
Clubs: Apply Directly to the Forehead
While combat between players is, in theory, completely avoidable, combat with the remnants of the conquering All-Mind’s army is inevitable. Husks of once great cities dot the landscape and in (many of) them lurk robotic forces that will violently resist humanity’s attempts to advance beyond simple clans of hunter-gatherers. Doing much of anything in a territory where robots still have a presence will cause a meter to rise – if it fills up, the robots will deploy a strike force to either raid you or terraform the environment in a way that’s counter-productive to your plans.
Fortunately, they can be smashed to bits. Indeed, said smashing can be accomplished with weapons as simple as clubs, hunting bows, and stone-tipped arrows, and their high-tech attacks can be deflected by simple clothing. I’ll admit it kind of made me wonder how humanity lost the war to begin with.
Said smashing occurs in a combat system that tries to shoot the gap between Endless Legend and Age of Wonders. Combat occurs on the strategic map, but you’ve got full control of your units in AoW fashion. Though this system makes a mockery of scale, it does allow narrow mountain passes on the strategic map to behave like narrow mountain passes on the tactical map. It’ll be up to you as a player to decide whether or not your archers being able to arc arrows over mountains or spontaneously generated fuel barrels detonating into explosions the size of cities is worth it.
Remember, climate comes into play in combat as well. Exactly like the strategic map, standing on home terrain heals your unit by 1 hit point per turn. A climate one step away stops healing, and more than one step away actually damages and slows them.
Fortunately, your Emissary – and their surrogate unit, the Shaman – can participate in battles and terraform in the middle of a fight to move the odds in your favor. In fact, some of the more curious terraforming options – like Acid Rain or Radioactive Clouds – essentially function as battle spells in combat. Again, just don’t squint too hard at scale: any changes that occur in battle do persist to the strategic map at their normal size, which requires just a little suspension of disbelief.
If combat isn’t your thing, there’s always auto-resolve, and, fortunately, it’s quite generous to the player. Perhaps even a little too generous for the moment: I can’t remember a single time I got better results in manual combat versus automatic. While it can be a little disappointing to not really have a good excuse to manually direct all the custom designed units you made, it’s hard to argue with the efficiency and convenience of auto-resolve.
Pimp my Wooly Mammoth
I’ve mentioned it in passing a few times, along with name-dropping Alpha Centauri and Planetfall, so it’s about time to take a closer look at Revival’s unit customization system. Like its predecessors, Revival works on a modular system, where you’ll first research a chassis that contains several open slots, and then research stuff to equip that chassis with.
While Planetfall had relatively defined units you could then apply tweaks to, Revival is more like Alpha Centauri in that your chassis is an almost blank slate, really only defined by its movement style, base HP, cost, and weight category of the equipment used.
A chassis has three parts by default: a weapon, an armor slot, and a miscellaneous slot. Weapon and armor define the unit’s combat role, with the miscellaneous slot being a catch-all for anything from special ammunition to genetic modification to a simple compass and map for more efficient scouting. And, of course, equipment generally comes with trade-offs – if you want iron plate armor and a heavy war hammer, you’ll pay in speed. Equipping everybody in the “best” of everything can actually work against you.
Further preventing you from going ham on defaulting everything to being as tricked out as possible is the fact Revival keeps track of individual resource types. Want Iron plate mail? Your unit now requires Iron to build. And not just “access to Iron,” but “3 units of Iron.” That means finding iron, building a mine on it, and controlling the region. Or trading for it. Or finding caches of it out in the dark corners of the world. Or looting it from the ruins of an enemy city.
The hunt for strange resources to field exotic and powerful forces is one of the better-executed aspects of Revival, especially when it has utterly bizarre results like glowing uranium battle axes. Sadly, this kind of crazy generally requires end-game technology since your nation won’t understand what Uranium even is until then. That’s something I hope changes, as yet another game that starts with clubs and stone arrowheads does Revival’s setting a disservice.
Country Roadmap, Take Me Home
While I’d love to go over exactly where Revival is in its roadmap right now, there doesn’t seem to be clear communication from the developer regarding its exact position. I think we’re in step three, the Event System Update.
Regarding events, Revival tries to follow the modern Grand Strategy-based trend of somewhat randomized storytelling but ties them to your nation’s tags. Essentially, an opportunity or disaster will occur, and you will be asked to assign a tag to the problem. If you are a nation of Metallurgists, Hunters, and Fishermen, you’ll have the option to dispatch a team from one of those groups to try and handle the situation.
If you send the correct type of team, you get a reward. If you send the wrong type, a popup describes disastrous consequences, but nothing actually happens that’s relevant to the game. What does “correct” mean? As far as I can tell, it means there’s exactly one answer from all available tags. Not all your available tags, but all tags, period.
Essentially, it seems like you’re frequently presented with multiple-choice questions in which you are statistically more than likely not to even have access to the correct answer as an option. Hopefully, this is simply a case of the feature still being in a proof of concept phase.
The next Roadmap stop is the “Victory Conditions Update,” and to talk about that it’d probably help to know what’s currently in the game.
Right now, there are three paths to victory: be the last magic staff wielder standing, a research victory where you discover the means of escaping Earth, or a somewhat lugubrious score victory tied to the All-Mind randomly generating goals, which are scored at the end of 50 turns. If you win three mini-competitions, the All-Mind declares your nation the winner and presumably proceeds to enforce this declaration.
The score victory sounds exciting but it’s undermined by the fact that eliminating another nation currently gives you all their win points. So, in practice, this seems more like a way to accelerate a military conclusion than an actual unique win condition.
Based on the roadmap, there are plans to let players either ally with or attempt to permanently defeat the All-Mind, so it’s possible these will lead to additional victory conditions in free play. There’s also mention of “scenarios,” which aren’t clearly defined – are these the traditional strategy definition of handmade, one-off maps, or are they something else?
Early Access
Let’s talk about the current state of Early Access since what “Early Access” means varies wildly between developers. As of early February 2024, Revival: Recolonization is in what I’d call an early to mid Beta. It’s either feature-complete or almost feature-complete but is missing most of that all-critical polish. This is not a case of Early Access being a pre-release or a paid demo but an actual, rough, in-development product.
I see a few major challenges Revival faces moving forward. First, and most importantly, is integrating its disparate mechanics. Many individual systems are interesting on their own but haven’t yet melded into a cohesive whole. Right now, it feels more like I’m constantly leaping between parts of several different games.
The second challenge is finding its voice. Revival advertises itself as post-apocalyptic, and while the story takes place after an apocalypse, it’s not “post-apocalyptic.” Maybe the nuance was lost in translation, but there’s a difference between nuking someone back to the Stone Age and actually returning mankind to the Neolithic period. A setting like Revival’s can quickly feel contrived when all you’re doing is discovering agriculture and bronze again.
A final headwind is that its unique twist, the climate, which is integrated into almost every other system, isn’t a fascinating system itself. For the time being, there really aren’t any choices to be made here – there are no incentives to do much more than paint the terrain your team’s color.
In Conclusion…
Revival is a 4x with potential, and even in its rough state can have some genuinely interesting moments. It has some big questions left to answer before release, though with no release date slated, it has plenty of time to answer them.
