Reviews

• Pvt. Parts

  Mar 27, 2023

  It was nice to combine plants, distribute the ones you like and see your island slowly get populated. One can select & combine plants that are higher to give higher offspring as well. And other traits can be selected for as well, such as amount of branching, type & color of foliage, trunk diameter and such. Graphics are not amazing, but adequate for the purpose, and the wind blowing through the higher plants makes them sway prettily. There is not much more to the game. Plants do not get selected based on the environment, and they hardly (if ever) multiply themselves (apart from the occasional randomized 'naturally occurring' combinations). So there is no selection based on the Mendelian traits. So you kinda have a static island, where most of the changes will be by your own hand. I do not really have a problem with this, I just want to make clear that the game itself is pretty simplsitic. Combinations can be made between seemingly wildly unrelated plants, which also is a bit of a simplification in itself. But if you find a plant species that you particularly like, you can manually collect seeds (or cuttings or whatever) from them, and combine & plant them to get more plants. When you only take seeds from the same mother plant, there will be recombinations of the traits occurring, but changes will be slight, and you will get a population of similar, closely related plants. This is a bit of a labour of love, since you can only take a maximum of 6 or so cuttings, and you need to combine 2 of those to get one seedling. Even this is not a game breaking limitation, although it takes ages to plant a forest of sorts. The problem I had was when the number of plant entities increased beyond a certain point, the game got slower and slower, to the point that it got even a bit unstable at times. This kinda killed the fun for me a bit. So: 1) Nice premise, with the Mendelian genetics you can combine different plants to create new species 2) You have to propagate plants yourself, none of the plants reproduce by themselves 3) Not much else to do. If you want changes you have to make them yourself 4) Too many changes, and the game gets less playable because of performance issues Buy it if you want to do some genetic recombination (on a very basic level), but do not expect a lot of longevity. Maybe wait for a sale too :)
• bador399

  Sep 20, 2023

  its really hard to multiply my new plants without making new species that i dont want or looks exactly the same, other, then that, the game is perfect
• gamedeal user

  Sep 8, 2018

  This is fantastic! Science all the plants! INBREED THEM. Fantastic. https://youtu.be/4rqtmGjiQ6E
• gamedeal user

  Sep 13, 2018

  A wonderful game, Mendel is designed for the person who doesn't like to think too much when they draw. Featuring maybe a dozen starter plants, the island soon becomes a colorful garden for the player to cultivate. By picking the bulbs of the various foliage the player can create generations on generations of neat hybrid plants. The boxy yet smooth graphics promote a whimsical atmosphere and creativity. There are some things the game can do better however. While the island is large and thus the plants are spread out, the player isn't too fast. This makes it a little tedious to jet forth between plants to gather bulbs. Compounding this is the 5 bulb limit for the player, styming the excitement the player may develop. There are some minor bugs: new plants don't appear when created, the text dialogs on hovering over plants may become 'stuck'. But these don't really detract from the experience. A feature I'd like to see going forward would be a better way to see the family trees of plants. As the generations of hybrids grow it becomes harder to see the big picture of it all. It would also be really cool to have more granular details for the plants, perhaps involving a punnett square to help inform decisions. TL;DR: This is a good, fun game to kill time with. Low effort yet it itches that need to create people have. There are some flaws but not enough to have a couple hours of fun.