İncelemeler

• gamedeal user

  Nov 29, 2018

  I would like to note the game plays well for the first hour and has the potential to become a great spiritual successor of Black & White if the devs would want it. Though the game give you the abilities to cast different types of spells, move stuff around, placing buildings and watch the nuggets go to work like ants, there are several issues I would like to address in this review. This game is in early access, so I understand the game currently abruptly stop once you reach medieval age. Firstly, I would like to address the current tech tree. At some point when discovering electricity, you are forced to pick Wind Power, Combustion Power or Kinetic Power... Why can we only discover 1 way to create electricity? It does not make sense, I would love the adversity and managing of being able to produce combustion or kinetic power when there is no wind as an example. This is a horrible and unrealistic way to give “player choice” and you seem to continue this througout the tree in the later ages as well. Secondly, as the player develop through the ages, more options to improve infrastructure should be given. Like roads, carts and future means for transportation. I hate seeing my village/city as a huge blob with no proper structure. If devs want to give players more direct managing of the city, at least let us make it look nice. I see there is a GIF on Steam store page showing the planet with highways and bridges, but there is currently no way to create your own roads or bridges. I would also hope more of a system to create aqueducts and later pipes or electrical grids. Though this last part may be too much to ask. Thirdly, the building menu and managing of workers is a mess! In the beginning with only a few buildings it is not a huge problem, but when progressing and increasing amount of buildings, need for micromanaging become much higher. There is a building menu where you can sort by name, workers, type etc. But it is in current state horrible and you will need to scroll through several pages, before you need to move to the building if you want to assign workers. Having an improved menu with better sorting and ability to assign workers directly should be implemented asap for convenience. Yes, you can build Town Hall later on to help out with auto assignment, but I found this feature to not work too well and managing the workers was still needed. I would also like an overview over what buildings is currently in construction or being upgraded. Fourthly(oh, I did not expect to keep going this far), I hope to see more conflict between the tribes. I was glad to see that non-player tribes was coming to life and making their own way somewhere else on the planet. But I miss further interactions with those tribes, like trade or war. None of the tech you develop allow your nuggets to learn trade, diplomacy or fighting. I would assume if my player-based tribe did not build on a mountain area, they could potentially trade iron with a neighboring tribe or go to war for resources. Fifthly( -_-), though I know Cryptivo is soon to release a new structure called The Prayer Enclave(google it), the current state of god choices is lacking significantly. While in Black & White you would be given different quests throughout the land, there was only a few popping up as a notification during my early gameplay in Universim and these did not affect my followers too much later on. Late game I was having a hard time to earn followers and it felt less like a god game, but more like a resource and worker managing game. Hopefully this will improve with the new structure. Now, there are a few bugs in this game. Like workers would mindlessly stop working and stand still doing nothing until they die or if you cast fire and it spread into the lake, it will continue to burn and spread under the water surface. But the game was for the most part pretty stable and had no major technical issues running. In conclusion, the game was decent until a point and I had some fun time playing it. But there are some major gameplay aspects and features lacking, not to mention that you only get to play up until the medieval era. The game currently does not look like anything as advertised in the video here on Steam, so I would warn others to tread with caution, as some early access titles may never complete or change their direction. I am giving Universim a thumbs down as I do not like the direction it is heading and I was hoping for a more diverse and immersive god simulation experience. P.S. Why cannot the nuggets just melt and boil the snow during winter to stay hydrated?
• gamedeal user

  Mar 7, 2021

  I really, really, really want to recommend this game, but I just can’t. I’ve been a huge fan of God Games ever since I played the original Black and White when it first came out, so when I first saw the blurb for The Universim I was hugely excited. And starting out this game looked like it had all the hallmarks of being able to live up to my expectations; procedurally generate world, decently powerful God Powers, meaty enough systems for you to theoretically really get stuck into and create a world that is uniquely yours. The problems however start appearing quite quickly, and unfortunately they are both legion and pervasive. The huge one from which ever single other problem flows is that the longer you play the less gameplay there actually is. And I mean that in the most literal sense: The game wants to automate almost everything for you, right down to allowing the game to place buildings without your input. And I mean ALL buildings. And sure, you can just choose not to research or staff the building that starts this automation process, but you never have any control, or any choice to take over manual control of where residential buildings are constructed (short of deleting the foundation as soon as you see it appear). This leads to a loop where homes will often be constructed outside the range of your service buildings, which leads to you build more somewhere you don’t want them. And by the time they are finished guess what? More home are now outside the range of these newly built services which means you have to build more of the damn things with no consideration to what looks good or logical, only to what covers the most homes. This makes it impossible to create a nice-looking city with distinct areas like docks or industrial parks. Instead you are left with a slap dash looking hive with no sense or reason (which is NOT helped by the fact that even the roads are also autogenerated for you and resemble spaghetti dropped on a plate). And if you decide to automate this to reduce the tedium, and because it doesn’t matter where anything goes anyways for the aforementioned reasons, you are left with exactually two things to do: Click on research every time you que is done and watch it count down (since its on a strict time and requires no other input from you and cant be sped up), or cast the same god power over and over and over in the hopes that it converts enough of your villagers (called nuggets here) so you have a high enough believer to non-believer ratio that you have a good God Power generation rate so you can actually cast god powers when you need to prevent a disaster. The one that could have been automated through the construction of temples or something somehow wasn’t. In short; its tedious in the extreme, unrewarding, borderline un-interactive in some cases and you are incapable of actually crafting anything that can be said to be uniquely you, which is half the damn point of a God Game. Which is a huge shame because like I said the systems are all in place for this to have been great.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 3, 2018

  ❤ Audience ❤ ☑ Beginner ☑ Casual Gamer ☑ Normal Gamer ☐ Expert The lack of a tutorial might confuse some people new to the genre, but if you give it a chance, you'll quickly find yourself getting into the swing of things. Strategy experts might find the limited amount of micromanagement to be off putting. ☼ Graphics ☼ ☐ Bad ☐ Alright ☐ Good ☑ Beautiful ☐ Fantastic It's really charming and stylistic. Fun to look at. ♬ Sound ♬ ☐ Bad ☑ Alright ☐ Good ☐ Beautiful ☐ Fantastic Sound is simplistic, but gets the job done. Some things (school bell for instance) are likely louder than they should be, but ultimately, it's alright sound design. ☠ Difficulty ☠ ☑ Easy ☑ Average ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Hard ☐ Unfair Verges on somewhere between an average and an easy difficulty for a game of this genre. Perhaps leaning more towards being easy, with very minimal micromanagement. § Bugs § ☐ Bugs destroy the game ☑ Lots of bugs ☐ Few Bugs ☐ You can use them for speedrun ☐ Nothing encountered This game is currently buggy. In my first 7 hours of gameplay, I ended up killing over half of my population because they all got trapped underground, eventually dying of thirst. I also encountered several performance issues that caused the game to stutter, primarily related to the autosave system. ☯ Story ☯ ☑ There is none ☐ Bad ☐ Alright ☐ Good ☐ Fantastic You could perhaps say that life itself is the story here, but that'd be stretching things a bit. ⚔ Gameplay ⚔ ☐ Frustrating ☑ Sleepy / Relaxing ☐ Boring ☑ Fun ☑ Challenging There are weird pacing issues throughout, where one moment you're fighting off wild animal attacks, and the next you're waiting 30 minutes for a new 'tech' to research. Depending on what's happening, you may go twenty whole minutes without much really going on, only for everything to seemingly start happening at once. ۞ Game time / Length ۞ ☑ Endless / No Length While I marked this as being an endless game, because quite simply, there is no real "end". As of right now, you can basically see and do everything that this game has to offer within the first ten or so hours of playing, assuming you don't accidentally kill everyone during your first winter freeze. There's a ton of potential, but you may need to wait for several updates before your Nuggets can truly shine. $ Price / Quality $ ☐ Full price ☑ Wait for Sale ☐ Don't buy ☐ Refund it if you can This is an early access title, which means it's incomplete. Is it worth full price? Arguable, though I'd have to personally say no. While I definitely enjoyed my time playing The Universim, the fact that it's an early access title, and that it's so early along in its development cycle, warrants an air of caution. I'd either wait for a sale, or simply wait, period. As time goes on, this game is sure to become more of a complete experience. So, just wait. If you must buy it today, you're unlikely to be disappointed in your purchase. But I can't rate what doesn't yet exist, so purchase at your own risk. I'll also be sure to update this review as time goes on. I have very high hopes here, which is why I'm ultimately recommending The Universim.
• gamedeal user

  May 29, 2021

  This is another great example of why Steam needs a "middle", between Yes and No. Taking the game as it is right now, it's an interesting little sandbox god game with too many bad ideas which crowd out the good ones. I always find myself in a never ending cycle of using god powers to impress the people so i have enough believers to generate enough god power points to be able to cast the god powers that are really needed when disaster strikes, cause your nuggets sure as heck can't protect themselves. Which brings me to the next biggest issue with the game: The nuggets are autonomous but helpless. And stupid. They will build their own houses and....that's it. They won't build their own water supply. They won't build their own farms. They will drink tainted ocean water and get sick constantly unless you tell them to build a well or a water reservoir. They will starve once nearby berry bushes are depleted unless you tell them to build a farm, or tell them to build a hunting lodge. I feel this is a leftover from my final point: Where is the game promised at kickstarter launch all those many years ago? This was meant to be a hands-off god game, in which the people you watched over would grow and develop and look after themselves but you could nudge them and inspire them to take certain paths of progression. THAT'S the game i signed on for, because there are more than enough micro-manager god games. And guess what this one has steadily become over time? The Universim is pretty, and ambitious, and still growing. But I fear it will never be what it could have been.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 15, 2022

  I really like this game. Here are some pros and cons: PRO: 1- Nuggets are highly autonomous so you don't have to micromanage them. For instance, if they're low on water they know what to build 2- You can prioritize buildings 3- You can use God Powers (GP) in the list of all the nuggets. There is also a search bar PRO or CON depending on player preference: 1- Easy when on neutral 2- Evolution happens very fast (in my 11 hours of playing I am almost at space age) CONs: 1- Unlike with the Nuggets, you cannot revitalize or use any other GP when in the buildings menu. To revitalize a building, which you will be doing very often, you have to travel to that location. 2- The buildings menu organization is a disaster. You have to click a dropdown and deselect everything to then select the buildings you want to look at. I'd rather have a search bar like the nugget menu 3- The research tree is another disaster 3a- Research is non-linear for a lot of it. If you skip one of the subcategories you could end up in the middle of the modern era with research still locked from the stone age 3b- I would rather have it broken down. I really like the way Surviving Mars has their research tree set up. I would recommend something like, citizen happiness, medicine, education, production, and technology. Additionally you should not be able to move on from one era without all categories researched 3c- I hate the discovery points. I think they should be used as an option to speed up research, but for many of the research nodes you cannot unlock them without a certain number of discovery points. This holds you back from later research when a random node in the main research line requires one of the discovery point ones from way earlier in the game. Tip based on what my downfall was in my first attempt: Build lots of cemeteries - if you don't, dead bodies will fill the streets and infect/kill nuggets. My cemetery workers were not fast enough at body collection so I tried to help by using my telekinesis and throwing corpses into the lakes. That was a very bad idea. The environment very quickly became toxic.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 18, 2020

  To be short, I will just list pros and cons Pros: - Enjoyable City Builder - Beautiful Graphics - Constantly being developed and new content being released - Game is challenging at some points, but overall provides a very relaxed experience Cons: - Inexperienced player who never played city builder games might have difficulty due to a limited tutorial - Need some additional mechanics for the God aspect of the game Gameplay: 8/10 Story: 7/10 Sound & Visuals: 9/10 (I love soundtracks in the game) Game Length 8/10 Bugs: 7.5/10 Overall Rating: 7.9
• gamedeal user

  Sep 1, 2018

  Silky: Game concept, not new but interesting. Rough: Completion level. WTF?!

  tl;dr - 4 year old restarted project turned "Early Access" with proven lack of project and budget management skills and now, conversation shutdown - for $30 a shot. You have been warned.

  UPDATE (Oct '18): Was going to start thinking postively for these guys after an update but they're applying favourable answers as "answered" in threads that are critical of them (instead of allowing the OP to decide) and then locking so you can't query the answer given. Now it seems locking (and deleting) critical threads - no matter how civil - is the norm. Even where people are asking whether to buy, they lock it up if they don't like the answers. These are NOT abusive rants breaching any Steam rules either - this is censorship. Check out the "posting guidelines" ruleset on their front page. It sets the tone for your discussion if you should be unhappy with something. Being civil and polite is not enough, your posts have to agree with everything they've done and continue to do. ---------------------------------------------------- And now... for the original review... I rarely write negative reviews but when I do there's a reason for it. More to the point, I rarely flag an EA title but when I do there's going to be a reason.

  UNIVERSIM

  Time flies when you're having fun.... and time is not on our side with this title...... This is fun with what you get and as we've come to expect it's full of some seriously SIMPLE errors that should not have got past basic testing. Typos abound, game freezes, poor AI, performance issues and general all round ugliness. But hey, it's EA right? Yeah. I know. (and I make more allowances than most for EA). Except.... almost 12k backers pledged $387,000 dollars onto this more than 4 years ago. When I saw the trailers on Steam it had planes, buildings, planets, nuclear power plants, a whole heap of content - all under the auspice of "early pre-alpha gameplay". So what happened? Where the fudge is the "gameplay" you're showing on the trailers? Indeed. This has just been "released" to Steam as an EA title with a fraction of the content, almost 3 years late off the kickstarter (it was promised to finish in October 2015). There is nothing in the store information to tell me that most of what I should expect is NOT in the game. But I SAW it. With my own eyes. So wtf is going on? EA is meant to help developers, well, develop. When it's a new project with some gameplay to get us all excited and invested then we're all on the same page. We play, we test, we report, we suggest, we argue, we... well, become the game for you.... with you. But I gotta' ask.... EXACTLY WTF DID YOU GUYS DO FOR FOUR YEARS? If this took 4 years and $400k to get here, how much more is it going to take to get this over the line - you know, up to where the trailer is? So..... either the rest of this is coming in rushes, with anticipatory kudos for the devs for "rapid development" or we've got us a problem. Sure... playable (and I'll play what I got) and yes, I'll update this review accordingly but the hairs on the back of my neck are tingling. What we have gets an 8/10. What we don't have, gets a wary eyebrow....... Not entirely convinced about this one. Caveat Emptor. (NOTE: "but it's EA" comments will be killed off because that's not my problem here. Ask yourself, if the stuff shown WAS "gameplay" - where is it now? If it wasn't in the game and was done just for the trailer, a lot of time and backers money has been spent on PROMOTION not PRODUCT.) ..oo00oo.. For those that like to see negative commentary qualified. Timeline. Posted May 17 2014. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crytivogames/the-universim/posts/845739 Note THIS comment. Please keep in mind that this information is based on an estimated timeline. The outcome is dependent on community support, which can either allow for some of the builds to be released earlier or we might have to push it back slightly. Push back slightly?? They were fully funded 4 days later.... May 21, 2014 - 4 YEARS AGO. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crytivogames/the-universim/posts/850761 What we have today, on Steam, at best, is *maybe* 12 months work and everything that presumably WAS done - remember "early pre-alpha GAMEPLAY" - is NOT there.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 29, 2018

  Love it. One way to describe The Universim is that it is like a modern day Black and White game.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 18, 2022

  This game has been in alpha for a very long time, it really should be near to being finished but it's still got a long way to go... I've had this game for a couple years now, IMO there has been very little added to the game during this time. I would advise anyone interested to hold off from buying this game until it has been finished. This game needs more story content and polish. Each play through feels the same and it does get quite repetitive. I would onlly give it 4/10 in it's current early access state, Hopefully things will improve with more time.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 24, 2019

  After playing quite a while now I have to give this game thumps down sadly. Depending on what they'll do with this game I might change my review later on. So this game is overall quite okay but it's also filled with a lot of nonsense and unbalanced features in my opinion. So here are the good and bad aspects of the game: +(Good) You are playing a god and you have several powers to play with. You can decide whether you want to be a bad or a good guy. -(Bad) However, it won't have much of an impact nevertheless. You can quickly be good or bad depending on your actions... +(Good) The narrator is very funny and I even had to laugh in some situations. -(Bad) He's indeed fun. But whenever I zoom in to my city and go near a hut or house, where nuggets having crazy sex leaving an earthquake behind, he says always the same joke over and over again. I mean it was fun the first times but if you hear that unlimited times it gets extremely annoying. +(Good) There is a lot of buildings and upgrade options. Which means it's a mix of a simulation and city builder. -(Bad) Unfortunately, due that you aren't able to upgrade everything which leaves some areas "not upgraded" forever even while in the modern age. It might be a bug. +(Good) You have a followers "believers" system similar to Black & White which gives you points to spend on to your power. -(Bad) The followers or believers are extremely unbalanced. You'll lose much more than you gain ultimately. It's very tricky and in my opinion the most bothersome task in this game to deal with. +(Good) There are a lot of mini-quests again similar too Black & White to gain extra benefits. -(Bad) These quests are very plain sadly and you can tell that the developers wanted to add similar features which you've seen in Black and White. Unfortunately, they couldn't keep up with that and it's rather bothersome than enjoyable. +(Good) There is trade in this game. -(Bad) I've never seen such a boring trade system in any other game. +(Good) At some point in the game, you have criminal activities such as theft, vandalism or even cases where priests from other cities are trying to get rid of your believers. It's a nice addition. -(Bad) Unfortunately, you won't have any methods to search for them. Everything is handled automatically except for those priests. You have to find them with your own eyes. Good luck with that if you have a big city with around 300 people... +(Good) There are some challenges like tornados, wasps who eat everything or even a ufo which you'll meet pretty soon. -(Bad) They might sound like challenges but they aren't. It's just annoying honestly. First of all, that ufo will appear over and over again he'll just spawn regularly and it's always the same situation. The same goes on to the other things. I didn't understand the point of adding these things into the game.