The Universim

This review is being made under 'in development' status so does not reflect the final state of the game. Having played for roughly 20 hours, I believe I can say that this game has clear potential. Despite still being under development and suffering from a variety of bugs, polish issues, and crashes, I enjoyed the time I spent in the game, and found the humor to be amusing and refreshing. This game clearly reflects the god-like genre that was lost to the ages many years ago, and brings back nostalgic notes of games like Black and White. While this game has no creatures for you to train and nuture, There are still heavy notes of your inability to directly control the Nuggets (simulated people) and your need to influence them through a small selection of creator powers which allow you to heal, create rain, lighten moods, and various other activities that allow you to help your people along. At this time, however, the creator abilities feel rather limited and you are required to get get nuggets to believe in you through exercising those limited powers. This is one of the larger problems that I struggle with when playing the game, having a population of over 100 nuggets and only 10 believe in you, which heavily limits the amount of creator points you can generate to really do much of anything to help your people or gain more believers. Hopefully this will be solved cleanly with further polish and balancing. While most of the gaming is 'hands off' with the people, you are still tasked with guiding their evolution and future. This is done via placing buildings like eateries, wells, and such for them to construct, and making decisions in the research tree. Some decisions are singular choices of which direction to take your people. For example, you can choose ONE of three different energy source types to develop. Combustion, wind, or kinetic (nugget/people) power, and you are locked into that choice once it's finished researching. A good game, with good potential.

For a game that was in development for over 10 years, I would not think it would actually release, let alone be this good. As the all-powerful deity of your people you are constantly helping them and nudging them in the right direction so one day, they can explore the stars. In the stone age you help bring sticks and stones to buildings, and heal people through prayer when they get hurt. Yet, eventually you'll have couriers and hospitals, and ministers to build them as needed. As you go through the ages, the things from the past get automated and you get to focus on the new thing like electricity and automobiles. Because of this, you always have something to do, and are rarely burdened with jobs and chores you don't want to do anymore after you've unlocked something that drastically changes how your city works Watching all this unfold is also great; The animations are nice, the narrator is fun, fighting exiles, keeping your population believing in you after the invention of the steam engine, and the joy of watching buildings upgrade from little stony hamlets to enormous skyscrapers is very cathartic. And this is just on your first planet. Once you go through some interesting story events and have the needed research, you'll be able to colonise the moon as well as other planets within your region. When I thought I was just about to get bored with the game, it threw terraforming at me and it was better than I had hoped. Turning a baren ball of rock into a green and blue home, seeing the first cloud in the sky, this game pulls it off pretty well. The interplanetary space ports and trading don't hurt either, and make the colonisation process a lot less boring. And I can't stress this enough, even without the spacefaring aspect, this game would be worth buying.

I really like the simplicity of the game. You have a research tree, can influence the Nuggets and it doesnt take itself too seriously. Very fun game to play, eventhough I only played for an hour im very addicted to it!

Never mind the early access reviews (as you shouldn't anyway at release time) - this game is great! It's difficult to stop playing it though :D

But this game is not Black and White. A god game, helping your nuggets to survive. I wish you had control over placing roads and the tech tree is really off. You spend too much time in the stone age to jump so far ahead into the future. I still like this game, I just wish you had much more control in how things are built.