BioEden Review — 4X Conservation

If you’ve never played a 4X game before, the genre’s title comes from the four “X’s” that define its main gameplay loop: Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate, which is a fitting nomenclature that describes the basic loop of building a powerful civilization, a city, or whatever it is you’re building, where you explore the land, expand your borders, exploit newly claimed resources, and then exterminate the competition. This genre usually celebrates the triumph of human ingenuity and is often based on human historical civilizations or fictional ones.

It’s no doubt something to celebrate, but as we begin to live in the reality of an environment pushed to its limits by our expansion and exploitation, it becomes a little harder to be so psyched to recreate it in video game form. After all, we all love living in a modern society with access to advanced healthcare, basic amenities, and the marvelous invention that is the internet, but we all wish we could enjoy these privileges without melting polar ice caps and deteriorating coral reefs. Now, with the addition of AI data centers, which are one of the biggest environmental disasters of our time and are dedicated to producing a technology essentially nobody wants that is making the population stupider and more misinformed than ever, it is safe to say that environmentalism is perhaps on the mind of the collective public more than it has ever been.

Enter BioEden, a game I have come to call a 4X conservation game. In this eco-conscious strategy game, players explore the remains of a devastated alien planet, expand the reach of their advanced conservation technology, exploit the remains of environmentally devastating debris, and eliminate pollution from the planet’s surface. BioEden isn’t the first of its kind, but the conservation twist on the 4X genre is still rare, and I honestly think it’s clever and pretty satisfying to play.

BioEden‘s gameplay is split between two sections: the dome and the overworld. Within your domes, you create nurturing environments where you incubate and grow the remains of extinct species. These animals have simple environmental requirements to fulfill, ranging from access to other animal or plant life to humidity and temperature requirements. You meet these needs by building habitats on a hexagonal grid, using the dome’s limited space to provide as many suitable habitats as possible, overlapping each animal’s territory to make the most of the space without being too invasive to each habitat. The ultimate goal for the dome is to safely restore a population before releasing it into the wild.

To release the animals, or even satisfy their requirements in the first place, you must build and exploit the resources in the overworld. Power and water generators must connect to fuel a grid that then allows you to harvest resources needed to produce everything else in the game, from the harvesters themselves to the plants within your domes to the research needed to create more animal species. Building on the overworld is a balancing act between exploitation, restoration, and impactfulness: The more you build, the more you can restore the planet’s environment, as each debris field you clear or river you clean reduces pollution. However, build too much at once, and instability occurs, making the surface dangerous and prone to both environmental catastrophes and sanctions from your guild. Recycling your old structures once they no longer serve a purpose and researching more efficient production engines therefore become the key to progressing.

Honestly, it is a really fun loop, and I got hooked on watching the map shift from sickly shades of corruption to vibrant colors as I cleared more and more pollution. If I’m being honest, the animal conservation side of the game, strangely, took a back seat to my impromptu quest to clean up all of the rivers and lakes on the map.

The only problem with BioEden‘s gameplay loop is that you quickly unlock, essentially, everything you need to thrive, and you do so with very little work. There is only one upgrade to power production, one upgrade to your connection lines, and so on and so forth until you’ve got the most efficient overworld setup possible. I found it incredibly easy, after unlocking the first and only upgrade to power production, to create a fully self-sufficient network without breaking the first instability warning, occasionally going over it just to mine large amounts of resources at once.

While the animal unlocks take a bit longer, you will quickly find yourself at a point where the gameplay has become repetitive enough and has lost its challenge, and so you start to wonder what the point might be. That is, at least, if you’re an experienced 4X player like myself: the game might prove more difficult for less experienced players, but anyone who has at least attempted a game of Civilization on Immortal will quickly understand how to defeat the barriers set in place by BioEden.

Overall, the game is fun, satisfying, and has a good message. It is fun to unlock new animals, expand their habitats, and restore the planet’s surface to an unpolluted state. That being said, the difficulty is practically nonexistent, and the game becomes a bit boring once you’ve realized that you’ve unlocked everything there is to unlock before the end of your first playthrough. Replayability isn’t really there either, as the different campaign options essentially just change the pace of the game or make other small, practically meaningless changes.

For $20, I’d say BioEden is a fine, even fun little game, but one you probably won’t get more than 10 hours of enjoyment from, depending on how familiar you are with 4X games. Still, it is definitely worth checking out if it’s caught your interest, but I personally would appraise the game more around the $10 or $15 price point and recommend checking it out on sale.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of BioEden. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! BioEden is available on Steam and Xbox.