The Universim

[h1]A Well-Polished Turd[/h1] I picked up The Universim after having it on my wishlist for a very long time, since it was quite early in early access. I'm a huge fan of god games (underexplored as the genre sadly is) and of city-builders, and have gotten plenty of fun out of sandbox style games in the past. Upon initially starting, I was excited; the art style is reminiscent of Spore, in a good way. A little less cartoony, but still vibrant and with lots of distinctive designs for creatures, buildings, and the landscape. Then gameplay started and everything went downhill from there. Despite the tagline for this game being a question "what would you do with the power?", the game has made it quite clear what it presumes you're going to do, as it saddles you with a misanthropic and sadistic narrator that makes it quite clear how much he despises both the nuggets (the people) you're in charge of and you, the player. It completely undermines the tone of the game to place down a hospital or whatever and receive snide remarks or open hostility for actually trying to engage with the city building mechanics. The worst part of the narrator though is the way a voice line plays every time a "busy" house of nuggets happens to be on screen. Which happens. All. The. Time. And the humor is so stale even Adam Sandler would groan. The game just also mechanically, kind of sucks. The tech tree seems to have been made by someone who overheard the concept of a tech tree once in passing and guessed at the rest, then shuffled everything around for the hell of it. You'll be pumping oil in the Stone Age but won't be domesticating animals until the Modern Age. It makes no sense whatsoever, and completely robs you of any sense of growing your civilization from simple beginnings into an increasingly complex one. Especially with how much of the design is taken out of your hands. Like the placements of the *roads*. And you sort of have to hand over an increasing amount of city design to the game as things progress anyway, because the UI is completely inadequate for keeping track of things like total capacity vs usage of buildings like schools and hospitals, food/water use rate and distribution, or total assigned nuggets to a given job. But hey, it's not technically a city builder! That's mechanically the main gameplay and everything but, technically, it's a god game! So let's judge it by that standard. Lets see. No customization of your godly style, your temple, or any sort of decorations. No narrative. Belief is basically arbitrary. A handful of disjointed quests that amount to busywork. Well, what about the powers? The destructive powers are the most numerous, naturally, because the developers assumed everyone would want to be throwing around fire and lightning I guess. Otherwise you've got basically nothing to do. You can pick things up. Yippee. Oh, and heal nuggets, of course. And play eugenics with them. Uhh. Hmm. Maybe it's better that the devs *don't* try to come up with original ideas. Overall it's a very pretty piece of nothing. I made the poop joke in the title mostly so I could bring up the fact that there is an extremely vile poop joke front and center in the farming mechanics that you cannot avoid or rename. That's the level of "humor" we're dealing with here. I guess I'll go look longingly at the Fata Deum store page again and see if it has a release date yet.

Abandoned with bugs. It reminds me of a deist view of god - let's start something and then walk away from it when it gets too messy. Not worth the money, the problems will not get fixed, and you'll just get frustrated and walk away like the developers did.

Every single thing that qualifies this as a God game is immediately locked. It forcefully spoon foods you the most basic game controls. It's just not the game it advertises itself as. Hard pass.

I'm only 41 hours into this game as of this review, which is generally a pretty short time for the games that I play. That alone has me somewhat worried about how long I can put into this game, as getting into colonizing other planets seems fairly rapid, and running out of technologies to discover happens fairly quickly. The creators seem to have gone down a couple of "rabbit holes" in what they'd like the extended gameplay to look like, whether it's restarting the game and getting new options for planets, races etc; exploring using the subterranean, or colonizing multiple planets in space. Maybe getting that figured out would help the players know what to expect as far as end game play goes. I would strongly recommend that the creators come up with a way to manage various planetary colonies easier. The governors and managers help a great deal, but there are some resources that are pulled directly from the planet and run out. You have no warning when it happens and come back to the planet with a nasty surprise. I would recommend a late stage tech/building that allows you to collect Iron, Stone, Gas, Oil infinitely, perhaps with advanced chemistry. That way your planets can continue without your constant management. I would also recommend an expedition manager, it's a great part of the game, but it gets ignored due to the constant need for high level resources and constant need for attention. Overall, I recommend this game, it has tremendous potential, and I'm hoping that the developers can keep going on it, they may just need to be monitored a little closer! LOL

This is scam. They never finished it. For the longest time it was barely"Tiny Planet Sim" but it certainly has nothing to do with an universe as the name suggests. I wished I get my money back.

i got this game when i was 11 and it was to complicated but now I'm 14 and love it its lots of fun

И сказал Бог: — Да будет свет! И да будет скорость распространения света в вакууме три на десять в седьмой! Потом подумал и решил: — Ай, пес с ним, пусть будет три на десять в восьмой!

The game is way better than I had thought. Originally I thought it was like all the other god genre games where you play god and smite everything. In this game, you actually want to strive your people through the stone ages, up to space age. Just building your city up and fighting the other cities and aliens for control over the planet takes like 10+ hours, and then it expands in taking over other planets. To which I was very impressed with because you can trade amongst the planets you built up and each planet isnt a copy and paste. They got planets with dinosaurs and all kinds of stuff! To top it all off, it has a lot of comedy in it, from the narrator making fun of things, or advertisements on the side of buildings. 10 out of 10, highly recommend, I did not encounter any bugs, and the game runs very smoothly for all the animations going on... I've not had this much fun or laugher from a game in awhile.

Takes forever to develop. Still has bugs.