The campaign mode looks bad and cheap, is very barren and lacks personality. Even after playing for many hours I still couldn't really distinguish one region from another, the whole map is just a massive boreal forest with cities, plus some roads that don't do anything (they don't speed up the troops) but glitch through terrain. Some soldier types are objectively better than others in every possible statistic, so there's very little balance here. The translation is awful, it's full of mistakes and sometimes bugs. I'm not sure where are the developers from, but they should hire a professional translator. The battles are pretty realistic (in a sense that you have to lay prone in some bush and shoot at small targets 500 metres away), but the buggy AI hinders your ability to apply any sort of tactic. For example, when you have a squad of 7 soldiers and tell them to hold position and the enemy approaches, only 2-3 of them will engage the enemy, others will just stay behind cover looking in the opposite direction. The real enemy in the game is rocks and trees, soldiers just love hiding behind them and shooting them. Because of this, it's better to order your troops to lay prone in the middle of a plain field than to seek actual cover, as counter intuitive as it may sound. Since the game lacks any sort of tutorial, I couldn't figure out how to give orders to my troops in command mode (by double-clicking, instead of the universally accepted right clicking or at least left clicking) and was forced to just wait for enemies to come to where my army spawned. It wasn't a big deal though, because this seem to be the best tactic anyway. Just get yourself a good rifle, occupy some hill and mow down hordes of enemies who try to go prone while they're being shot at, but due to their lack of patience get up 3 seconds later anyway just to get killed. I recommend waiting until release. With better graphics and some AI tweaks it could be a fun game.
I was quite hyped for this game, but alas, I can't say it met my expectations (it may be the problem of my biased perception though). It's quite polished in comparison with most Early Access games these days, it has adorable graphical style, the narrator is voiced nicely, yet the main problem is that it's just not very fun to play. It's one of the very few games that managed to confuse me with what should I be doing. See, The Universim positions itself as a god game, and even in the game's intro you're told several times how the job of the creator is observation with minimal influence when necessary, however, it's all thrown away the moment the intro ends and you have to manually order construction of buildings, directly influence your units, decide what they research, etc. What it lacks is any kind of challenge that makes the RTS/base building genre fun. In other similar games there are opponents you have to compete with (Black & White, or Spore on its Tribe and Civilization stages), or natural/environmental threats (Banished, Frostpunk) to keep the players on their toes. The Universim has none of that, so I personally did not have any kind of motivation to develop my civilization, nor did I feel attached to it. The tutorials were also rather lackluster and currently there's a bug that makes them unreadable which doesn't make things easier on the player. There's also lack of feedback on what do buildings actually do - for example, I still cannot understand what's the difference between a well, a water pump, and water storage, because the purpose of all three is to provide water, yet I had all three and the counter of stored water stayed at zero. Overall I think The Universim could grow into a fun game, but the developers need to figure out what exactly do they want it to become. If you're interested, the best option would be to give it a try and see for yourself - perhaps some of the problems I've listed here will get addressed in time. Perhaps.
