Second Earth is a fantastic base building game that plays like a blend of SimCity and Command & Conquer with a healthy dose of tower defense, with you harvesting resources, building an infrastructure and setting up towers to keep the alien hordes at bay.
At its core Second Earth is a tower defense game, where you have to build towers and walls to keep the waves of attacking aliens at bay. However, describing it as just a tower defense game is doing it a big disservice as there’s a whole lot more to it than that – to run your base successfully you need to harvest resources and set up an infrastructure.
You need to build mines, houses and farms to harvest resources. You also need to build roads to connect them all up along with garages for delivery trucks that transport the vital resources. Most buildings need power, so you need to build solar farms and power stations, along with pylons to deliver the power.
There’s so much to deal with inside your base that you can occasionally forget about the hordes of alien bugs trying to get in. Thankfully there’s a nice selection of towers to keep them at bay – just be sure you have the infrastructure to back them up as a tower with no power or ammo is useless. Aside from a slightly confusing one way road system, building your base is very intuitive too, especially thanks to its simple and unobtrusive tutorial system.
There’s a lot of gameplay in the prototype, with eight full levels that will take a few hours to play through. Even in these early stages of development Second Earth is a very impressive game. It blends tower defense, resource management and infrastructure building to create a fast paced base building game with lots of depth. It gives players total freedom to build where and what they like, and has a very satisfying loop of building and battling alien bugs. Highly recommended.
Note: The transport system can be a little confusing. Make sure you build all your roads in a loop (as they’re one way) and make sure they pass through the loading area that sticks out of the ore mines so that transport vehicles can pass through it.
Check Out a Gameplay Video Here
Download The Second Earth Prototype Here (Windows & Mac)