Reus 2 Review: A God Game That Grows on You

More than ten years after the original Reus invited players to sculpt worlds with colossal elemental giants, Abbey Games returns with Reus 2, a sequel that’s bigger, smarter, and more ambitious—but not without its stumbles. It remains a creative god-game at heart, focused on nurturing ecosystems and influencing human civilizations through careful world-shaping. Yet while its ideas are impressive, its execution, especially on consoles, keeps it from divine status.

At its best, Reus 2 captures the same quiet satisfaction as its predecessor. You still command your giants to terraform planets, place plants, animals, and minerals, and watch settlements thrive or collapse based on your balance of nature. This time, however, the scale expands across a solar system. Each planet you create represents a new run, and finishing one unlocks new biotica, traits, and combinations for the next. It’s a clever progression system that gives the game long-term depth and keeps experimentation rewarding.

A new feature called the Draft system adds another layer of strategy. During each planetary run, you draft biotica from a selection of unlocked options, choosing which species, minerals, and environmental features will be available. This determines how you’ll build your ecosystems. The most powerful of these are Apex Biotica: rare, high-tier species that can dramatically influence the balance of a planet. Unlocking and using them is satisfying, but it can also lead to analysis paralysis as you try to juggle the many interconnected bonuses and synergies.

While it’s great that Reus 2 provides a tutorial this time around, it doesn’t do enough to explain how all these systems interact. Terms like “symbiosis,” “prosperity,” and “biotica adjacency” are mentioned, but not deeply explored. Players are left to piece things together through trial and error. For a game with so many moving parts, clearer onboarding would have gone a long way.

When everything does start to click, Reus 2 feels rewarding. The removal of the timer from the first game makes the sequel more relaxed, allowing players to think through each move. The visual design is appealing, with bright, stylized art and a pleasant ambient soundtrack that invites long, slow sessions of tinkering. Watching your settlements evolve through different eras feels meaningful, and the new planet-to-planet structure gives a sense of continuity that was missing before.

Unfortunately, Reus 2 struggles mightily on consoles. The interface was clearly built for PC and has not been adapted well. Text is extremely small, with no option for UI scaling, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, to read from a couch. The control scheme is equally awkward. Rather than offering full controller support, the game often forces players to use the thumbstick as a makeshift mouse. It’s a frustrating setup that constantly reminds you this is a port of a PC-centric design, not a tailored console experience. For a game meant to be thoughtful and relaxing, these missteps pull you out of the experience far too often.

Despite these frustrations, Reus 2 still delivers moments of calm creativity. Watching biomes flourish and civilizations grow in response to your choices is endlessly satisfying. The depth of its systems rewards experimentation and curiosity, especially once you begin unlocking new biotica through repeated play. But it’s also easy to feel bogged down by its complexity or constrained by its clunky interface, issues that newcomers, in particular, may find discouraging.

For fans of the first Reus, this sequel offers more of what made the original special, with added strategic layers and long-term goals. Yet it also loses some of the simplicity that made that first game so approachable. For strategy fans who enjoy games like Dorfromantik or Before We Leave, there’s plenty to admire here, but patience will be essential.

Reus 2 is a smart and ambitious sequel that grows beautifully in concept but unevenly in execution. Its systems are deep and its ideas bold, but its technical shortcomings and uneven guidance keep it from true greatness. Right now, it’s a complex and rewarding evolution of Reus that’s best enjoyed on PC, while console players may want to wait for some much-needed polish.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Reus 2 is available for PC, Switch 2, and Xbox Series S/X.