The Universim is an ambitious game developed by Cryptivo since 2014. During its Kickstarter campaign, the game gained over $400k in backing and is still on everyone’s mind. The game continuously gets patches and updates and actively prepares for the full release.
The Universim is a city-building sim where you have godlike powers. What are you going to use them for? Your time is coming. But let’s start at the beginning!
The game begins as you observe the creation of the entire universe – an extremely mesmerizing and beautiful act. Then we see a planet where intelligent life begins to emerge, a life that you can be able to control and direct. Your “Adam and Eve” call themselves nuggets and can do very little without your help.
The game features an intuitive colorful interface, strongly reminiscent of that from Spore, cleverly separated by the color scheme and accompanying you through the game. The Voice will help you get started: sometimes jokingly, sometimes cynically or ironically offering you tips on what is happening, what needs to be done and what areas of the game require your attention. The Voice will keep you company through the game, explaining how things work in the beginning, offering jokes but, sadly, growing quiet by the end of the game.
As your faithful grow in number, you will get access to more divine forces. At first, it will be easy to do miracles: Cupid’s arrow to connect two hearts, a little rain here or there to fill water tanks, lightning to kill an animal or an especially annoying nugget…
You start with just two nuggets that will start your mighty civilization and the future planet-spanning empire. The Voice will advise you to use Cupid’s arrows to connect their hearts so that their children will further develop your People. Constructing buildings for your nuggets will be your main task with the divine forces acting more like an entertainment than actual help.
That particular part left me a little disappointed, I was expecting something closer to Black and White where the gameplay was centered around the powers. I can’t say that your power is completely useless, but closer to the middle of the game they lose their significance, instead yielding to competent planning and city building.
Supplying your nuggets’ needs is no easy task: lack of water, poisoned pools, food, animals, other resources – all of it will be up to you. Divine powers require the energy provided by the faithful. Completing tasks, healing your nuggets or performing miracles will increase the number of believers that supply you with energy. Therefore, the initial tasks will have a very strong effect on your population although you can still strike a disgruntled nugget with lightning – the divine wrath will bring you believers as well, mostly those who want to make sacrifices in your name.
Each power has its own useful applications, healing allows you to instantly cure the nuggets from deadly diseases and poisoning, telekinesis helps you move the right resources or nuggets to the correct place, rain can fill water tanks, put out fires or clean up a polluted lake, etc. Other options include being able to fry a wild animal with lightning or bring down an UFO (more about that later), a meteor can bring forth devastation but offer a mysterious box with blueprints from within its core… or maybe a deadly virus that will be wiping your nuggets out by dozens.
There are many divine powers but closer to the middle of the game they lose their significance, taken over by science and management.
When you get to a point that the game starts spawning UFOs, you get access to an interesting feature: trading. When aliens start flying by and stealing your nuggets, you get a way to punish them. After all, what kind of god would suffer such transgressions?
After a few lightning strikes, UFO will crash and the surviving aliens will build a trading post that will allow you to trade Faith Points, resources or nuggets for whatever they have to offer, be it pieces of blueprints for the Wonders of the World or rare resources. Do you have a lot of Faith points? Spend them on the lacking resources. Too many nuggets? Sell three dozen of them for a piece of the Great Wall of China blueprint. This trade function can frequently save your pets from extinction – I was haunted by a constant lack of food and water, showing my inexperience at leading a civilization.
One aspect of development is the technological tree. Some skills greatly affect nuggets’ everyday life or even change the development era, others simply improve on the past discoveries.
You can’t unlock them all at once, each research takes time or discovery points – obtained from cultural buildings in expeditions. Tasks for discovering breakthrough technologies are issued by your nuggets – for example, for the discovery of electricity the Tesla nugget issues a petition to help with building a battery that needs to be charged with lightning.
Such tasks will accompany your game for a long time. Comic, serious or deciding the ultimate fate of your followers – these tasks should be completed in a timely and accurate fashion. When moving from era to era, your nuggets will effectively re-construct buildings in new styles, although there will be things you will have to upgrade manually.
Tasks and quests will not let you get bored and reveal your attitude towards your nuggets: will you listen to their pleas or send them straight into spam. It is up to you, but ignoring such requests finding a missing son or punishing a bully can cost you believers.
The latest updates to the game introduced the system of underground exploration and space colonization with a terraforming system. Later on, you will need that very much as by the industrial age your planet is likely to get very polluted, making it difficult for nuggets to breathe. The trees are dying, the water is getting dirtier – colonization opens up new resources and planets for your people to live on. What race doesn’t dream of getting into space and finding distant horizons?
Underground expeditions unlock through a quest in which a monster is attacking your village. These expeditions earn you both resources and discovery points.
It is great that the game continues to evolve and develop but, in my opinion, the developers need to change some of the mechanics. The Universim features a lot of interesting, thoughtful and fresh mechanics but the way they connect together is kind of lopsided.
The divine miracles look spectacular, be it tornadoes, meteor destruction, lightning striking enemies, even rain – all of it is great entertainment but it becomes redundant closer to the end of the game. The town-planning aspect of the game also needs some work, upgrading buildings one by one after upgrading an age is quite tedious. Especially when you need to search for a few dozen buildings in a sprawling megapolis.
The Universim features amazing humor, sometimes cynical, sometimes silly. Beautiful graphics that you quickly fall in love with, and that doesn’t bother you after dozens of hours. There is plenty of interesting mechanics and interactions but some of them need refinement and polishing.
At the moment, it feels that the game’s concepts in their current state are extremely interesting but not finished. A lot of key mechanics are missing: like weather affecting nuggets, colonization influence on the planet, etc.
As it stands, I continue to play this wonderful game with pleasure but I’m still waiting for the final version with improved/reworked/finished mechanics. Being a god at the very beginning but losing that wonderful experience mid-game kind of hurt.
