For those who love games like Populus or Black & White, The Universim is worth your time. The game is currently still barely in the beta stage yet is showing huge amounts of promise. It lets you play God to a brand new civilization, giving you the powers to both create and destroy.
The Universim plays like most God creation games of this type. You take control of a civilization and steer their progress. However, unlike many sim games, there is nothing to draw from but your own creation. You need to build your settlement from scratch, starting with literally just two people, or nuggets as they are known, and a stone-age shack.
Starting A Civilization
The game starts from the ground up with you choosing your epicenter location. You must then help your nuggets fall in love, so they can start building a civilization. The game then pans out as you would expect, with you taking control of what to build and what to discover.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the game is that it is completely from the ground upwards. You start with absolutely nothing and your nuggets are definitely not the smartest. While you can research, the tree of options is huge, meaning you need to choose the best options to grow a solid infrastructure.
As with any simulation game of this type, building in the correct order is vital. For instance, while you can access water pumps early on they freeze in winter so if you didn’t store any water then you’re in for a rough ride. You’ll also need to ensure you have food and shelter for your nuggets.
Choosing Your Path
You are given the God powers of creation but you also have other skills as well. As a creator, you can control the weather, your nugget’s emotions and even gravity itself. This means you can choose to use these powers for good or evil, creating a civilization who either love you or fear you, the choice is yours.
Your God powers are not infinite but the points you spend to use them regenerate fairly quickly and have a high cap so you can save up and then unleash a huge amount of chaos (or love) all at once. Choose to bless your people with love, healing, and fertile forests, or send the storms in to show them who’s boss.
How It Plays
For a beta, the game is incredibly in-depth. Some of the research branches are not yet completed but most are marked and further down the chain so you can see what’s coming. Building a strong civilization without them is absolutely possible and very enjoyable.
The main issue right now is the building of certain buildings and the distribution of labor which it feels like players have no control over.
Shelters are built by nuggets themselves, once they fall in love or move out of the family home due to lack of space. This means that they are in utterly random locations, something that’s incredibly annoying when trying to place wells to ensure full civilization coverage for example. Being able to see a pop up allowing you to choose the hut’s location would be preferable or even just the option to move it, since currently only destroying it appears to be an easily accessible option.
The other thing players seemingly have no control over is the division of labor. Certain buildings of high status are assigned nuggets to work in them. Eateries, hospitals, schools, civic buildings, and other major structures give you control. You can place the nuggets best suited into these roles. However, all other nuggets are either children or laborers.
Laborers don’t appear to be controllable, at least not easily. They will find food and supplies but there doesn’t appear to be an obvious way to assign a laborer to a specific task eg food, wood collection, stone, building. They will complete tasks that need doing, and builds can be prioritized, but I hope being able to assign tasks and work areas to laborers is added into the game.
The Verdict
Overall, The Universim is enjoyable and very promising. It has a great graphic style, a strong foundation, and an enjoyable concept. There’s also plenty of time for it to iron out the minor issues and become a truly amazing civilization sim game.
NEXT: Journey To The Savage Planet Review: Short, Sweet, & Slimey
