Thrive on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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An evolution simulation game. Take control of your species in the environment and edit your species as a whole. Compete with other evolving species for resources on an alien planet.
Thrive is a simulation, science and sandbox game
developed and published by Revolutionary Games Studio.
Released on November 26th 2021 is available in English on Windows and Linux.
It has received 1,278 reviews of which 1,180 were positive and 98 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 3.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Thrive into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4570 or AMD Ryzen 3 3300U
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 530
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Additional Notes: OpenGL 3.0 capable GPU and drivers required
Linux
- OS: A distro that is at least as new as AlmaLinux 9
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4570 or AMD Ryzen 3 3300U
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 530
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Sound Card: PulseAudio compatible
- Additional Notes: OpenGL 3.0 capable GPU and drivers required
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
For an alpha, of an alpha... it has better gameplay than some fully developed games that I've seen. The development team was not originally a studio, basically just a band of volunteers and college kids that wanted to play spore but actually realistic, and here we are so far. Still not out of the cellular stage, won't be for at least a few more years, won't be finished for maybe 10-30, but this game is just as realistic as real life. Unlike Spore, where you just get "parts", and add them to make your blob better, with cartoony eyes, which are actually multi-cellular constructs, you have a legit cell. Don't be fooled by the version, that's the version of the respective stage, so this isn't version 0.8.1 of the whole game, only the cell stage. Once we move beyond 1.0.0, that means multicellular development will begin. Want to know why it is going to take so long, even now that the game has a full on studio and is getting good funding? The developers have to teach themselves biology, and parts of chemistry and physics. That's right, they'll all have science degrees before they get even near finishing the game, because the same people coding the game need to have intimate knowledge of how life works, from the bottom up. You get a blob of plasma instead, completely empty. You can customize the cell membrane of it, each one has upsides and downsides, and there are some obvious choices like a cell wall if you're making a plant. From there, you need ATP. There's a bare minimum to survive, and a point where your cell is overstuffed and begins to divide itself, organelles first. When it completes that's how you enter the evolution menu, the cytoplasm fully divides in mitosis and you evolve the new generation. EVERYTHING, uses ATP. Not at all like the zero upkeep "parts", these actual factual organelles all use energy, on top of needing it to move and even exist. Even the Mitochondria (baseline energy factory, takes sugar makes energy) has upkeep, it doesn't directly take ATP but each one has diminishing returns, and even reduces the total amount of energy you can make if you over do it. Evolving in this game isn't so much as based on what you want, as what you need, exactly how it is in nature. You have to endure the full process of homeostasis, if the water pressure is too high you squish, too low you separate apart, too hot you burn, too cold you freeze, radiation is bad (unless you can eat it) and a bad ph balance can dissolve you almost instantly. Once you run out of glucose (sugar) in the environment, suddenly the game goes from all to easy, to fighting to survive. You have to either find a different way to harness the environment for survival, like converting iron particles through a rusting process (forgot the organelle name) for energy, taking in radiation like a little fission reactor, or there's even an organelle that makes ATP when you go from a hot part of the map to a much colder one, which I didn't even know was a real thing! Otherwise, you have to learn how to hunt, all of which can be done multiple different ways as well. And don't forget about the AI. This is not like most games, where the AI is either a guide, a supplement for a real player, etc, this game's AI is trying to survive and thrive just as hard as you are. They start off evolving slow, only doing it in response to environmental changes, so they can either go long periods without evolving much, or periods where they completely change every generation. They split off from your initial plasma blob, since it's basically the first cell on the planet, meaning there's only a few AI in the beginning and they aren't that unique, but as the game goes on the planetary ecosystem gets exponentially more diverse and complex. For every weapon there's a counter, and for every environment there's a way to make energy from it. Like I talked about earlier, or when I briefly mentioned making a plant, which is something you can do. Unless of course a competitor evolves an organelle to dissolve your walls, and then you. Makes sense that the easiest gameplay style has the hardest drawbacks and counters, so being a plant is more of an AI thing than a player thing, but it's an option. If you get poisoned, there's organelles that can make you partially immune, getting enough can make you fully immune, and eventually there will be multiple poison types each with their own cure. The biggest goal of the game, as of 0.8.1 of the cell stage, is obviously going multicellular, but how? You need a Nucleus, which unlocks more complex organelles, but takes more ATP than probably the rest of your cell combined. After that, and getting to a stable enough point, you start dividing into a cell colony. This is where the game really starts to look nothing like Spore, and keep in mind this is all still in the first out of 5 or 6 stages planned for the game. Now, you don't just have to care for yourself, but all, of yourself. If you don't have enough food to sustain the colony that's a huge issue, and you have to either shrink some or the game will shrink you for you. Once you get to a certain cell colony size, you can coalesce into the next plane of reality: Multicellular life. This, and every other stage, "technically" exist but are bare bones placeholders. Multicellular though is more fleshed out than the rest ofc, since it's the next one, but it's also vastly different from Spore. Who knows what it will look like in the future once it starts getting worked on, or when it's finished, but what I do know is where Spore gives you a little goober that you make bigger on land with different parts, in this game you are going to start just as realistic. I imagine probably becoming like a jellyfish or something, since that's the first multicellular creature along with early forms of "proto-plankton", because they have a similarly gelatanous body and food requirements, first getting it from their environment, and then possibly getting it from others. Evolving organs or your body shape, or who-knows-what-else is also going to likely be the same vibe as organelles, where everything takes energy, and has upsides and downsides you need to carefully balance. Even just thinking about real life, we really don't know what could happen, because every evolution at that point was a magical feat. Fins, skin, and then scales, I imagine where the cell stage was somewhat linear, this is the point where you really get to customize yourself. There's a different between "multicellular life", and "animal", so where Spore is basically stage 2, 2A, and 2B of life smushed into just stage 2, this game does the process justice. Similar to how you start as a cell in stage 1, stage 1A is getting the nucleus, and stage 1B is becoming a cell colony. Getting on land is going to be a feat similar in scale to getting a Nucleus, without any immediate benefits, requiring an already stable enough creature, but broadening your horizons to the next level. Who knows? Maybe the game will be full on, truly almost sandbox style, like Spore but completely realistic. If that's the case, then you could stay in the water and evolve fish people, or become a bug, a parasite latching onto another creature and feeding off of it's success, a dinosaur, a bird, the possibilities are endless! These devs also want to ambitiously go way beyond, after going to space and becoming an empire there will be an "Ascension stage", that might just be winning, or a sort of new game plus.
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This is what spore promised but failed to deliver. The choices you make here have significance for your organism. Its simple to learn and fun to play. Its is short I have played thru in 3 times in 11 hours. I think there are some more things to test out but this is not going to be a time swallower. Good things: - Easy to learn and experiment with. - Well presented graphically - Clear impacts from your choices and good info to help guide your choices. Downside is that the evolve mechanic needs reworking. 1. to allow you to abandon a well developed organism and see how it prospers once launched. Moving to an interesting daughter while allowing the original to continue to prosper. 2. to pivot more advanced organisms to enter new environments. At present every change you make immediately affects all versions of you bacteria in every environment even if two colonies are isolated. And the inability to pivot more complex organisms to enter new environments greatly restricts the ability to move between biomes. This is because you can't affect more than one or possibly 2 features a cycle and that is insufficent to traverse some biome boundaries. There will also be a danger as this develops of keeping the simulation/ gameplay balance right, so far I think they have done a good job. At £4 this is a worthwhile buy and its worth supporting the developers.
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It has promise, but there's not much to the game past the 2 hour mark. Once you hit multicell stage everything is unbalanced and a mess. Trying to advance past that stage is nearly impossible due to the imbalance of chemicals and the huge amount of competitions. Overall, the game is a bit too complex for my liking. I was hoping for something more simplistic like Spore, but this is more heavily science driven to the point that it make certain things far more difficult to understand. After 3 hours I'm fairly pretty much done, having done everything that I am capable of doing. Part of that is my own skill level and the complexity of the game, but part of it is are the long periods of chemicals being no where in sight, or disappearing before I can get there. Movement is about 25% too slow for my liking as well, despite remaining fluid. Maybe this game will get better as development progresses, but as it stands this might be up your alley if you have the stomach to handle complexity and heavy science.
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Bacteria! We begin with only one! Bacteria! Two is what we then become! Bacteria! Each of us becomes two more! Bacteria! We are stronger than before! Bacteria! We keep growing at this rate! Bacteria! No longer shall we wait! Bacteria! The plan now unfolds! Bacteria! We will take over the world!
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Best game that will never be finished ever Play this game and it will consume your mind, body and soul. You will spend the rest of eternity begging god to see Thrive, thrive. yet it will never come, the devs are great people from what I've seen and they are trying as hard as they can but this project is to much for any mortal to make. if you are fine with living on crumbs, and yet not being able to be angry at the devs because they are doing all they can, buy this game immediately. I don't even care if you don't like microbiology please just give the devs more money they deserve it for even trying this. as for the actual finished content of the game, its great. currently only microbiology but very in depth with plenty of potential niches to occupy, there is support for both autotrophy and predation with multiple ways to achieve either or both. My personal favorite is making Photosynthetic organisms, which the developers have been expanding lately adding a proper day/night cycle to make Photosynthesis more engaging and difficult. and to the devs, if you see this. thank you, for everything you and those before you have done with this project. I wish you luck.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 13 April 2025 23:03 |
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| SteamSpy data | 11 April 2025 20:24 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:47 |
| Steam reviews | 14 April 2025 17:49 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Thrive, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Thrive
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Thrive concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Thrive compatibility
Online players
17
Developer
Revolutionary Games Studio
Publisher
Revolutionary Games Studio
Release
26 Nov 2021
Platforms