The Universim

I was an early backer that loved the idea of a new God Game, Enjoyed Populous, Black and White, and others. This doesn't quite make the mark of a good game in my opinion and it felt like much was rushed to meet release. You are both a hands off god and and hands on god. Your people will do things like gather food and build themselves a house, find a partner, automake roads, and make new Nuggets, but everything else is planned by you. Nuggets need water or farms? Then you need to tell the nuggets how to build it and where. All research is picked by you and not figured out by your people. Until you get a city hall you have to manually assign people to jobs. In some ways you are guiding the nuggets and in others you are simply doing their job for them. You have powers, but those come through prayers. Using your powers to create couples, to heal, or to harm will create followers. City planning for nuggets who think rocks are edible doesn't however. Sometimes using your grab powers to help supply resources to sites can be noticed and create new followers but that is infrequent as well. By the time you get to the first age change, you will likely have half a population that does not believe in you because you don't have enough prayers to have power to do things to influence them. A big issue to me is city sprawl. You can have an early game village of 30 people and it feels like you need 5 water sources, 2 farms, and half a continent to house it all. Even if you follow the pre-gen roads, building won't line up nicely next to each other and there are no combo buildings in the early game so every kind of need has its own building. That would be fine if many of those buildings weren't massive. Housing plots can't be updated to increase the number of houses, so you will have many neighborhoods with 1-2 houses taking up space when it should default to 3-4. Each house has room for 2 adults (1 male and 1 female) so if you have 30 people, that is potentially 10-15 different house plots. This issue compounds as more space means needing more repair buildings as they have a radius which means more water which means more people to work them etc, etc. The thing that got me to stop playing was the age transitions. You are not warned what will be needed after you research the upgrades for the building you had or what will change. I was working my way to the Middle Ages from the Stone Age and started to upgrade various things when I had noticed that my nuggets had moved outside the range of the repair buildings. Because of the upgrade, I had the new cost for the repair buildings and couldn't down tier to the stone age ones I had been using. The new cost require iron bars and educated nuggets. Likewise, any repair building I had upgraded didn't require iron, but did require an educated nugget. School were unlocked roughly the same time as iron, so I had no educated nuggets and very little iron. So I got to watch as part of the city built and fell down over and over while I could do nothing; I had no prayer power, no educated nuggets to work the buildings that were up and no iron production so I quit. I want to say it gets better, but from what I have read from different people there are even more baffling choices later on in game as you go. If you are interested then get on sale, otherwise I would recommend another city builder/god game.

One huge flaw in the game mechanics stops my enjoyment of this game that is otherwise mediocre Roads Seriously? a new planet already has the whole planets road system mapped out in a random way that you can't change that stops you planning your city properly - can't place that here there is a road in the way

I can't in good faith recommend this game even though I think it is alright. The price is much too high for what it is. It's fun for a little while, and then it immediately starts to drag and get boring. When you hit the space stage, there's nothing new. It's just what you've already done again. The exile system doesn't work properly and exile civilisations will attack constantly regardless of relationship, meaning that trading and the airport don't do anything because you're constantly having to stamp out exile civilisations. Creator point needs also outstrip generation way too fast. Generally, it somehow manages to be both boring and stressful. Also, this game has been largely abandoned. They've tossed a few small token updates but the content added is half baked and generally doesn't affect anything. Overall, it lacks content and the gameplay is boring. I'm going to complete this and then never touch it again.

Unfortunately unfinished, even as of v1.0.2. The developers had an absolute gem of a game in the oven that just needed more time to bake before starting to cook up another game. It is now abandoned and no longer being updated as far as we know. You may have fun with the game, I certainly do from time to time, but if you are looking for a finished city builder with proper balance, depth and progression, steer clear and look elsewhere. Will update should the game get picked up and worked on again. Cheers.

Backed this game way back in its conceptual stages. They really fell short yeeaaaars after they started taking peoples money. Definitely unfinished, people like me have burned through every new update, hoping they would really get to the point where it is more fleshed out and delivering on claims, are done with it. For a new person looking for a civ builder, sure its fun and you get a rise out of it. I recommend it for new players, at a lower price point. But for the folks with rose colored glasses, we have been left behind. Abandoned games shouldnt be able to charge more then $10.

This is about as exciting as watching paint dry. There's no real tutorial - or at least if there is it stopped working 15 minutes into starting to play - so I have no direction in this game. Oh to be sure there's a tutorial button but after about 3 instructions it just stopped idoing anything. At least it told me how to move the camera I guess? The common answer on learning this game is "go watch YouTube videos" which isn't exactly how I want to learn the very basic objectives of a game. So far the game play amounts to waiting for research to finish, building a new building if that research node happens to unlock anything and wait another 10 minutes for research to finish. The research tree is large I suppose, so the game has that going for it. If there's any story the game isn't prompting m for it. If there's any point beyond building I'm not aware of it. So when I say it's about exciting as watching paint dry I'm not kidding because there's almost no game play here. There's no goals, no directives and no interim quests being issued. And no, I didn't start a sandbox game. Apparently, this was shoved out the door in a fairly incomplete status if the forums are to be believed. After playing it for 2 hours I can believe it. It seems like there are elements here that would make a decent game - the God powers combine with a city-builder - but honestly I haven't found anything to do but wait and watch. And it's not that cute or entertaining to make me want to do that for long. So I don't see myself playing this much more. But that's pretty typical of a Crytivo game - lots of unfulfilled promise. They're like the anti-Hooded Horse in that they somehow snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I do really enjoy this game. I've had it for quite a while, before it came out of early access. I've always loved the Idea of a "god simulator" and I think this game does act pretty effectively on that front. I love the aesthetic of the game, I love the goal of the game, but I HATE the gameplay. The game suffers from extremely bad design that really hampers the experince of the game and makes it feel like a drag. The game is decent in the early-mid game, however it take absolutely forever to do literally anything, and progressing to getting electricity take HOURS, because the speed up time is limited to 2X. Maybe that's intended but its boring. However once you GET to mid-late game the game becomes a desperate fight to keep your civilisation from running out of basically every resource. Oil, Gas, Iron and Stone are the 4 main resources you have to mine out of the world, and AREN'T replenished whatsoever. Although stone is abundant and Iron is only a pain in mid game, where more efficient steel replaces it, gas and oil are absolutely abhorrent to get. So the game dissolves into trying to keep your resources around while also having to deal with other parts of your civilisation and it becomes EXTREMELY ANNOYING. Your attention is dragged into so many directions that it doesn't feel like a god sim anymore, and more a god awful city builder. Although you'd think the self governing systems you get with the town hall would alleviate some of these problems, allowing you to focus on late game space colonisation and managing other aspects of the civilisations, they don't. In summary, the game suffers from extreme civilisation sprawl and bad resource systems that make the mid to late game feel like a drag, not to mention how long it takes to get there. I WANT to like this game, I like the concept and the idea of being god and especially being able to terraform planets is very interesting, but it is very poorly executed. If nugget self governance was improved, and resources more easy to manage then I think this game would be very good, but I have a funny feeling this games been "finished" and nothing will be fixed. Don't waste your time.

The game has every potential and reason to be great aside from one fatal flaw: research. The massive tech tree in this game is locked behind timers that cannot be altered. You cannot speed up the research, so you hit a bottleneck pretty fast where youre just waiting to progress your civilization with literally nothing to do. If that mechanic were changed the game would be great, but of course its an older title by now and wont. Most of my recorded playtime is me letting it run for a few hours afk to let things research while i play other games lol.