Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox Reviews

this game is interesting enough in its mechanics, to me, to give it a thumbs up, although seeing the general opinion and commentary on this game i see there are just as many reasons to give it a thumbs down, a neutral vote would be amazing here. all in all this is a fairly simple looking game, but not very optimized for what it needs to do, especially when populations start going into the thousands the game grinds down to a snailspace or worse, this is because of the many calculations going on while the game is not multithreaded, leaving it incapable of processing its own data at a fast enough rate,besides that, and if you keep populations low enough (amount depends on your pc's cpu power) you will have a fun time for a while. this is a game where you try to play a balancing act with the 3 types of available creatures, in my opinion its not the greatest thing in existence, and will get dull pretty soon, but its fun enough and will keep you busy especially if you are going after the achievements, which once you understand how the game works are easy to get, but before that moment you will fail and struggle a lot. weird as it is, as the deciphering has little to do with the game's actual content, the most fun i had was hunting for the codebreaker achievement, the content you unlock is however very very relevant to the game and will greatly help you understand the games core mechanics ;). if you are into a game that uses the concept of evolution/genetics or just like something different for once, then get this game, preferably when discounted. its not everyones cup a tea, but surely worth checking out, also there are not many games in this type of simulation genre anyway so give it a try.

Intelligent design is an interesting simulation and definitely a fine pickup when on sale. Growing a thriving ecosystem has never been so interesting nor intimate before. Taking place far, far away on a desert planet you pilot your remote drone in a small designated area growing plant life with the intent of creating a pocket thriving ecosystem. This of course takes time and effort to balance out. Have you what it takes? That all depends on whether or not you enjoy simulation games coupled with wanting to simply watch the world unfold before your eyes. Drawbacks include a simple genetics scheme and lack of explanation to what the genetics options actually do. It's definitely a game where you just sit back and watch with minimal input to reach a working balance. Experiment. Sit back. Relax. Intelligent design is your personal creation put to work.

This game has a nice idea at it's core. Unfortunately, it is flawed in many key ways that basically make it unenjoyable. First lets talk about bugs:[list] [*] [strike]The collision box for the sky box does not work. Moving up to the top of the map causes you to vibrate against it. On at least one map (I haven't test them all) it is possible to move off the map entirely and see down the side. Not even an invisible wall.[/strike] Fixed by Dev. [*] The UI toggle button doesn't fire once per press. Hold it down and it will flicker, once per frame. To actually toggle the UI you have to either tap the key as lightly as you can, or get lucky that the frame you lift off is a frame where the UI is in the state you want it in. [/list] Now, annoyances (minor):[list] [*] Drop down menus won't close when the player doesn't want to interact with them. To close a drop down menu you have to open one of the other menus that isn't a drop down and then close it again. [*] Annoying controls. On the research station and radar there is a single intereaction button, "upgrade" and "Activate forcefield". Since space is the key for perform action then you'd expect it to activate those buttons, espcially as while your hovering over these machines all other activities the space key can perfrom are disabled. Instead you have to detach the cursor from the camera to click the button. Annoyingly, once you've made the mouse hover over the button, space will now activate it. [*] The slog. This game has a slow start. You need 750 biomass for your first research station. With a generous 10 biomass from your first collector, that's 75 seconds. Now you can increase the rate of collecting. A second collector costs 600. So assuming exactly double the rate from having 2 collectors we're at 60 + 37.5 seconds to get your first research station with 2 collectors. (And that's not counting the fact that your collecting rate drops overtime, without fresh plants). [*] The fact that game punishes you for interacting with your biosphere by lowering "world efficiency" when you do interact with it. I am playing an interactive experience, yet I am punished for actually trying to increase the rate at which it does things. Yes, I'll let you parse that through your head. [*] The inability to have more than one save. I don't think need to elaborate this point. [/list] Now for the major annoyance. The unbelievable level of obscurity in this game. Yes okay, I'm supposed to figure things out. I did quite well for a few things (like world score or world efficiency), however it would be nice to know what half the genes in the genetic engineering this game proudly boosts as one of it's key features, actually did. Height, root spread, max speed, turning speed. Those are all pretty obvious genes to alter, it makes the plant grow taller or it's roots wider and makes animals move or turn faster. What about absorbtion? Is that absorption of water from the soil or CO2 from the air? How about "efficiency" and how does that relate to a plant? More importantly, why am I given a choice as if it pertains to what I think it means (how well a plant manages it's resources) then surely I want to crank that up to 100% all the time, which makes this busy work at best (make a note of this, we're coming back). Cohesion, how does that pertain to animals? Apart from making them resistant to Star Trek diseases that affect cellular cohesion. And that's not taking into account genes that have obvious names (like competitiveness) but you're given very little clues as to how it relates to the biosphere in general, as yes competitive plants will kill off less competitve ones, but what about an ecosystem completely full of competitive plants? Will they all metaphorically strangle themselves to death, or will it be okay? This obscurity around one of the key mechanics is infuriating, as even in an "explore it for yourself" style game, one mess of one of these genes could create a species that annihilates your entire biosphere. Not to mention you can have plants that are perfectly fine until they spontaneously combust. And the fact that animals will breed, lay eggs but never hatch. Had that a couple of times with no feedback as to what I was doing wrong. The developer says they want you to experiment, but to experiment you need a hypothesis; and mine begins and end with "I'm left with a bunch of burned plants and no idea what caused them to spontaneously combust, as it definately wasn't the environment as they made it through midday just fine". Back to that busy work, in game that actively punishes you for adding things manually there is a surprising amount of stuff that you are required to do that by all rights you shouldn't. For example that efficiency gene from above, if it's entirely beneficial why should I have to manually set it to max? And the science system is a joke, where you only unlock one gene at a time, in a fixed order, but you have to go and manually click the unlock button. I can forgive the generic science buttons, as that has a choice between plants, herbivores and carnivore unlocks, but for the dedicated unlocks, it's unnessecary. Espcially for a key mechanic. Also, the whole thing carries a cookie clicker vibe of using numbers to make numbers go up faster and nothing really to do with those numbers except make other numbers go up faster. Don't believe me? You spawn plants. You place a collector to collect biomass. You use that biomass to make a research station to generate science. Science unlocks a gene called max biomass that increases the biomass you get. The game even hits the "leave it by itself for a while" vibe pretty nicely as I got my best score by getting up and getting a drink. Came back, can of coke in hand to find my score had doubled and I'd unlocked two achievements for high efficiency. Finally, I can't rate their story as the method of delivery is so poor. At most I can tell you that you work for a company, and they may be nebulously evil, going from the store page description and some odd dialog in the tutorial. Other than that, occasionally a small green square on a black circle with some text on it will appear on the ground with some text on it. One felt like a sentence from another player confused as to what they were doing, one was a length of random characters in a code and one seemed like a message from the Dev asking for feedback. Oh and if you though that I was going to whale on the GUI and graphics, I won't. I can understand that. It's the general bad ideas in what otherwise could be a good game.

Science! This is a game for people who enjoy patiently solving puzzles. Completing all the game objectives is not the end game, it's where the game starts. Once you know how everything works, you spend time trying to develop genetic recipes for plants, herbivores, and carnivores. You can conduct experiments inside the contained forcefields. You tweak the balance until it stays stable. You observe how random mutations either help or hurt the design. I spent an entire day developing my "stepping stone" plant recipe. Over the next few hours the plants mutated into taller "fat candles" that were better able to stand up to the stresses of wild fires and getting munched on by herbivores. This weekend I've assigned it as a science project for my homeschooled kid. I haven't figured out how to get the herbivores and carnivores into a stable balance yet. I have lots of experiements left to run! The down sides are in the simple graphics and unpolished UI. Framerates do drop when populations get high. This is because every plant and animal has its own genetic profile and behavior. The game is still new and the developer is rapidly working on improvements. The lastest update, allowing you to scan existing organisms to see their genetic values was a big help. (Keep up the good work!) If conducting experiements and tinkering with variables is your thing, you will love this game. If you're looking for a polished commercialised adventure game, this isn't it. The $6.99 price tag is pretty decent considering the hours I've put in so far.

This is one of those rare little indy gems that I'm really glad I grabbed. It's an ecological balancing act, and a fairly classic one if you've done your reading. At its most basic, you've got plants, animals that eat plants, and animals that eat animals. The trick is to have enough plants to support a population of herbivores, and enough herbivores to support a population of carnivores. Everything evolves. You can also impact that evolution directly. If your balance is off, then you might have a situation where the herbivores are breeding too fast and eat all the plants, and then die out, leaving the carnivores with nothing.... and the next thing you know you're flying over a barren planet. Or you might be fine, but suddenly your carnivores start breeding too fast, and wipe out your herbivores... then they starve themselves, and you're flying over a planet full of shrubbery and nothing else. Graphically simple, but quite pleasantly charming. Audio is almost non-existant apart from some music. The UI could use some polish and is a little cludgy... but the game itself is nice. I would like to see a bit more transparency around the genetics side of things, and I would like to see some more aesthetic variety on the life forms - which tend to be represented by quite simply polygonal shapes - but it's early days yet, and these things may come. The game slows down a little in later stages - but that might just be my relatively poor rig. It's one of those rare games that lets you choose your level of involvement. You can micro-manage your colonies, or you can throw your life-forms onto the planet and come back in a couple of hours to see what you've ended up with... both have so far been quite satisfying. Do I recommend this game? Absolutely - with caveats. It still feels a bit early-access - though I understand work is continuing - and if you're after an action-packed roller-coaster ride, you should probably give this one a miss. This is a game which requires you to quietly observe what's going on and figure things out which might feel a bit opaque to start with. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Conceptually, this game is interesting; create a balanced ecosystem to terraform worlds, via genetic tinkering. By examining what survival strategies work, and which ones don't, you can create more adapted, survivable organisms more likely to flourish. Unfortunately, the game makes achieving it's own goals difficult ENTIRELY through being opaque about data. Genetic traits are not explained. Some are obvious, some are not. Changing traits and observing differing outcomes between species is difficult, because you can't view an organism's traits after it's created and you can and often will lose them amongst other organisms, making gathering data impossible. Further, you can't track individual populations, so two near-identical looking populations coming into existence instantly means you are unable to observe the success of either group; they could both be flourishing, or one might have gone extinct immediately. The end result is that simply spawning vast numbers of random organisms, and waiting the few minutes it takes for natural selection to choose succesful organisms is both faster and more efficient than attempting to make your own; making it a game that rewards you for not playing it.

While I like the idea of this game I’m quite unsatisfied with the presentation. The game gives you not enough information about the results of your experiments. - There are no explanations about the genetic traits you get to modify. - There is no statistic which shows you how any of your creatures fare. There is only a total. - There is no automatic history of your creations so you can not go back and try the same build in another area. Though you can save the current settings to file. I haven't tried loading it though. - There is no clicking on a species in the game window to get ANY information about it. So you can only change the values and stare on your testing grounds in hope to distinguish the different species and see how well they do. With more information this game could be fun, even with this reduced presentation.

Great concept! Unfortunately this game is far from production ready. Looks more like a school project in progress. Lacks basic UI fundamentals and uses what looks like placeholder modules. I think the developer is on to something but this could use a lot more work.

I've only spent a few hours on this game so far, but it has me quite intrigued. As of late June, 2017, it is a fairly new game, and the developer has decided to allow the players to do most of the figuring out of how the game's genetics (and other factors) work. This is very much a "Sit down and sink your teeth into the mechanics" kind of game, and it is very, very much focused on genetics, evolution, adaptation, and extinction. You can create plants, herbivores, or carnivores. You 'earn the right' to control some of their genetics over time, but you can create random individuals without controlled features whenever you like. Once something starts to survive, especially if it is a plant, well there you go - good luck getting rid of all life in your place again. I really like the study of genetics. I don't want all the factors explained to me, and I want great depth and complexity. This game offers me this. For example, plant color. Sure, the graphics are simple and representative of the genetic differences... but there are visible phenotypic differences. Some plants are a different color - but there is no "color" gene. It's something else making the change. And through study and comparison of individuals, I can see where it clearly isn't, and where it probably is... and lo and behold, it is likely from the interplay of two different genes... Such studies entertain me. Real genetics are as or more complicated than this, and real genetics are not labeled as doing whatever until scientists figure them out - and even then, it is not certain everything has been understood yet. The game mirrors this well. I like it. Additionally, once you earn the right to control some genes, you can only partially control them. Natural variation extends outside of the range you can create. Want to get exceptionally low or high values? You can start in a direction, but that's the end of the "intelligent design" - it's the environment and random happenings that take over. I have noticed gene values can go negative as well. What does -1.4 "seed drift" gene mean? I don't know yet, but the game has just enough visual detail combined with genetic detail and space for individuals to play out their phenotypes that I think I can puzzle it out. I highly recommend this game for those who want to sink their teeth into a genetic drift and gene function simulator, who want to figure it out from many, many examples instead of being told.

This is a game for people who like observation over interaction. The game starts off by giving you the option to place randomly generated plants, plant eating animals, and animal eating animals. Each creature has a bunch of genes they are made of. At first those genes are hidden, but as you place research stations near activity, you reveal the hidden stats and are allowed to modify them for future plants and creatures. After you unlock new genes, you can start placing your own plants and creatures. From there you get to observe how they interact with each other. You can make plants invasive, so that they spread fast and take over, or you can make plants that spread slow but are giants, or giants that spread fast! It's really up to you and what you want to see or experiment with. So far I have really enjoyed watching the enviornment grow and change over time. The graphics may be simple, but the game is definitely enjoyable to watch. Personally I have it running on a second monitor to see what happens over time. The game is definitely not for everyone, but for those who like to watch a world grow and change, you might want to consider picking this up. PS. The leaderboard is a great addition that compares your world score with other players.