Gorgeous, 91% rated Plan B Terraform lets you revive and run an entire planet

Manage a factory? Sure thing. Manage a city and its population? Doable. Manage the ecosystem of a newly-formed planet to create and sustain life itself? Sounds ambitious, but heck, I'll try anything once. In Plan B: Terraform, that's the goal. In this management game, you play god, overseeing a fully simulated planet with weather systems, wildlife, resources, and more. After receiving glowing reviews during more than two years in early access, Plan B has just hit 1.0 with a huge update that, among many other things, lets you become an eagle and soar over your blossoming world.

Plan B: Terraform is a commentary on the seemingly inevitable, depressing future that humanity faces - the Earth is screwed, so it's time to find a fresh planet to settle on. This new world has all the potential to become a life-supporting planet, however, when you get there, it's barren. It's your job to terraform it - create greenhouse gasses to increase temperatures, melt frozen ice deposits to create oceans, and create an environment where flora and fauna can flourish. The planet is enormous, by the way - it's made out of over a million hexagonal tiles, so you can zoom right in to place tiny, one-tile machines and monitor individual animals and plants, or zoom all the way out to watch fully simulated weather systems roll across Earth 2.0. It's pretty hypnotizing.

So too are some of the supply routes you can set up across your planet to serve all the emerging cities. Like so many of the best management games, after mining resources and building factories, you need a way to get goods to the people. Road systems for trucks, flightpaths for drones, railways for trains, and shipping routes for, erm, ships can all be set up to shift things to where they're needed. Once built, they are all automated and zip around in real time.

The overarching goal is to get your population as high as you can while still maintaining a healthy, thriving planet. It's not aiming to be a super stressful and hardcore management and simulator game, but it's certainly one of the most beautiful. Its satisfying systems (and those gorgeous visuals) have earned it high praise from early access players - as of today's 1.0 launch, its Steam user score sits at a 'very positive' 91%.

While most of the major innovations and improvements have been made already during Plan B's two and a half years in early access, developer Caddy Games has dropped a couple of surprise additions with version 1.0.

Once your oxygen levels reach the point where life can be sustained naturally, wildlife will emerge on your planet - and now, you can become any individual animal and explore your world from their perspective. Whether you want to prance around as a deer, plod about as an elephant, or soar above it all as an eagle, this new feature only adds to Plan B's beauty.

For those that don't want the limitations of all the management and simulation systems, the new creative mode also gives you free reign to simply craft your perfect planet. "Add or remove water, mountains, minerals, and more," Caddy Games says. "Options are also available for unlimited resources, fewer constraints, and total creative freedom."

Plan B Terraform's 1.0 version is live right now on Steam. Until Friday, September 5, you can also pick it up with 15% off, making it just $13.59 / £11.46. If you're interested, head to its Steam page here.

If you find Plan B's active, real-time ecosystems satisfying, check out our list of the best simulation games for some similar thrills. Or if exploring a massive planet is your idea of a fun day out, our best space games recommendations have you covered.

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