World Turtles Early Access Review

With thanks to the folks at RE: Cog Mission and Freedom Games, we’ve been taking a look at their galactic chelonian strategy builder, World Turtles. This one is in Early Access currently, so while we’re bringing you our early access review remember things may change. We’ve been taking a peek through the meeps, to let you know how World Turtles is fairing right now.

The Basics – What is World Turtles About?

World Turtles is really sinking its beak into the management genre. You’ll control a small tribe, living on the back of a galactic star turtle. The title requires a fair amount of micro managing for people and resources, as you aim to grow your territory and entice outside meeps to join your tribe.

In addition to this, getting harder as you sprawl across the disc world (note the space, please!) of the turtle’s back, you’ll also need to care for and steer the turtle itself. Like any good management sim there’s a nice research tree to unlock technologies which improve your settlement and help to support the turtle. By feeding it, it’s also possible to steer the turtle, helping it to avoid galactic-sized hazards while you focus on maintaining things on the ground.

You’ll use a rather compact build menu to grow your settlement and provide resources, leisure time and exploration capabilities for your tribe of meeps. Doing this effectively will leave you with a surplus of housing, food, health and order, and this surplus is what attracts meeps from the surrounding area.

Eventually, after some work to bring the turtle back up to health, you’ll be able to properly steer it through various galactic sectors, each of which will have an effect on water levels and climate for your meeps. Both the turtle-based maps and the universe themselves are procedurally generated, meaning you’ll always have something new to play through.

You can do this across three map sizes currently (or build your own map entirely from scratch), and we know there are plans to introduce a more narrative campaign as well. With the wholesome nature of the title, it’s likely that things will stick with the “cooperation rather than conflict” premise to keep things nice and chill.

Is World Turtles Safe for Children?

As an Early Access PC title, World Turtles is not yet rated by PEGI or the ESRB. However it is one which so far seems completely devoid of any troubling content whatsoever. The title pushes a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, rather than warfare and bloodshed. While it’s early access, and anything can happen, we would be truly surprised if anything troubling was added to this one prior to launch.

Is World Turtles Accessible?

In terms of accessibility, World Turtles is a fairly laid back title. Rather than failing with a city collapsing around you, mismanagement mostly means that your territory and meeps just slow or stop developing, and for the most part it can be fixable. However, there is a lot of micro-managing which you’ll need to do, especially as territory grows and your meep numbers expand. I’m a little on the fence for accessibility overall, but verging on the side of Low Barrier at this early access stage.

The Run Down – Our Five-Point Early Access Review for World Turtles

As ever due to the early access nature, we’re not giving final scores just at the moment. As it stands, gameplay for the title has been a little hit and miss. The tutorials give you the very basics of the game, but certainly could be expanded on to give you a little more information, especially when it comes to different building types. In addition, there have been a number of times where we’ve really struggled to find space for new buildings, which has dragged expansion to a halt in a bit of a vicious circle.

There are some truly great concepts here within the gameplay, and while it’s not hooked me in currently it’s one which I’ll be following with interest throughout the early access period. World Turtle is quite obviously a labour of love, and while it’s a solo development project it’s one which has a clear amount of passion.

At the moment, visuals are certainly lacking for World Turtles, especially within the UI, and close up on the map. Sadly, this also doesn’t help gameplay currently, making things a little harder to work out as you play through the title. Fortunately the developer looks to be enlisting some UX and UI specialists, so we do expect this to improve in the coming weeks or months, closer to launch.

The audio in the title is quaint and laid back, and it does work very well in the setting. The only slight annoyance here is the popups for artist name and track whenever the tune changes, which is fairly front and centre in terms of screen real estate and can be distracting. The spoken dialogue is surprisingly nice when compared to the visuals, and the soundtrack ties things together nicely for a fairly relaxing experience most of the time.

We’d also like to see a little more narrative in the title as we move towards launch, especially as a single player title. Whether voiced or written, there’s nothing really to speak of for storyline in the game so far. There is a campaign mode in the works, from what we can see in the menus, and that will be very welcome when it hits the title a little down the line.

Replay is fairly midding at the moment, with three map sizes and four challenge modes. There is also a custom map generator and a full map maker where you can design the terrain yourself, however we’ve found this to be a little too time intensive and can take a little of the joy out of then playing the map. Again we note the campaign mode planned for the title, which will really help replay score closer to release.

Overall, World Turtles is on a little rocky ground for us at the moment. It’s clear that the title has some great concepts and there’s a lot of potential here and development continues. It is an early access title, so it’s only to be expected that there will be some work needed. While it’s one I’ll likely put down for now, We’re definitely going to be checking back at regular intervals prior to release.

It’s very clear that the developer has a huge passion for the title, and while it does need work, we don’t doubt that it will see it over the coming weeks and months. It’s not ticking all of our boxes today, but we’re very excited to see if it’ll live up to expectations for launch.

As ever, to provide this preview and common-sense parent’s guide, we received a free copy of World Turtles from the folks at Freedom Games.