Management games have had a bad rap over the years among the general gaming audience, and I think it’s because they all look more complicated than they are in practice. It’s also hard to market the true height of management games, which is sitting down for three straight hours playing the game while old episodes of Family Guy run on your second monitor. Nova Lands is one of the best “podcast games” I’ve played, a term which I use affectionately; it engages you just enough to keep your mind busy while running something else in the background, and is probably more accessible than any other management game I’ve played.
There’s not a lot to the mechanics of Nova Lands, but the layers build on themselves in an easy-to-digest way. Your custom astronaut lands on a strange planet with few resources and an oxygen converter, and is sort of unleashed unceremoniously onto a small island. My biggest fault with this management sim is that it doesn’t really have a tutorial to speak of. You’re supposed to mess around with stuff until you understand it, and then start building. For someone like me who has played a few games in this genre, it only took a few minutes, but I worry that someone new to management games will be totally lost at the start.
Interestingly, once you get through the initial hump, Nova Lands is wonderfully accessible to newcomers. Much like how Minecraft veterans know the first thing you need to do the second you load in to a new world is to start punching trees, you’ll need to engage with harvesting as many resources as you can around the starting island in Nova Lands, such as water, stone, wood, and berries. Soon you’ve got a stone furnace to make charcoal, which you’re using to power a larger furnace that melts ore into bricks, which can build a larger furnace… you get the idea.
Nova Lands feels like a much more user-friendly and better looking version of Factorio, a game I certainly can’t complain about since I played it for 20 hours in a single weekend. That means more than survival; you’re going to be concentrated on the next step of automation. How do I get Task X to run on its own so I can start working on Task Y? And once Task X is operating smoothly, it’s on to figuring out Task Y’s automation route while performing Task Z. It’s a fairly natural evolution of gameplay in games like this, but it’s all quite smooth in Nova Lands.
Your biggest friend in the world of automation is the bot. There are three types of bots: collectors, guards, and harvesters. As you expand out to the 13 wild islands that surround your own by unlocking new materials, you’ll need to keep things running on the mainland. Collector bots will grab and harvest items they are told to, guards will either guard other bots or hunt down animals, and harvester bots will move things around the island to make sure tasks can continue. This is all controlled from a central bot station, much more convenient than having to individually control bots.
You’ll set up bots on the outer islands to start harvesting the unique resources that appear in their biomes and with the help of moving cranes they’ll make their way back to home base all on their own. As I said before, Nova Lands is very well paced. As soon as you’ve got a task automated, you basically don’t have to worry about it anymore. But how to advance what we can do here? We’ll need to use science!
A research station allows you to upgrade what you can build and what kinds of materials you can process into what. There’s also a skill tree, and each time you level up (by automating better) you can pick up some new stuff to buff your character. Soon, you’ll uncover an island of survivors that have set up shop, and they can increase your speed, armor, and guns. Oh yeah, you have a gun.
Traveling farther from your island you’ll uncover boss fights, which were not very fun. However, upgrading my guns and armor made them not too difficult, and they drop some rare materials. You’ll discover there’s way more content than it first seems in Nova Lands; while it took me around 10 hours to finish, I can see a single campaign lasting well over 20 hours if you really want to maximize your alien factory.
There’s also the museum, which is a nice touch. Much like Animal Crossing, you can bring excess materials to the museum to store, which is just a nice little extra thing to do while you’re waiting for enough plastic discs to print. Hunt down five crabs and bring them to the museum, enjoy a little trophy. Mine is almost filled up, but those who are completionists certainly will want to max it out.
There’s a good few mechanics I didn’t even touch on, such as traveling to space, setting up interplanetary trade routes, and harvesting meteors, but I’ll let you experience the late game stuff on your own. In the meantime, I heartily recommend Nova Lands to anyone who is thinking about getting into management games, who loves automation-driven games like Factorio, or who is looking for a good game to play while listening to a nice audiobook. While the start stumbles a little by not explaining much, it’s easy to grasp how it all works just half an hour in. Nova Lands doesn’t really do much new, but I think it’s pretty much the best version of what I’ve seen management games do before, and that is certainly commendable. Get out there, grab a harvesting rifle, and get to work!
Nirav played Nova Lands on PC with a key provided by the publisher. Nova Lands is available on Steam June 22, 2023.
