The Universim Review | Creative Incarnate (PC)

When you first take a look at The Universim you might be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of development and creation at your disposal. Being a title that focuses on godly intervention with civilizations, you’ll have to micromanage creation itself. Keeping this in mind, Universim is the perfect addition to the RTS city builder genre. Mixing serious issues like disease and weather phenomena with silly instances of movie references and aliens entering the mix. It’s clear that despite being a light-hearted experience, the developers, Crytivo, wanted to produce an experience of choices and time management. And for a game that focuses on these aspects, Universim accomplishes it all with flying colors. 

At its root, The Universim is the simple idea of being a deity looking over a civilization of followers. To this degree, it will give you a feel similar to Idol Gods, and the Age of Mythology series with a far more simplistic art style. Despite this, graphically, Universim is an absolute beauty fusing functionality with artistic design. Keeping this in mind, while some designs might be simplistic, their colors and shading produce a masterpiece. However, beyond this, the story of evolution itself can be seen through time spent on The Universim. There will be moments of personal hardship and others of satisfaction for the choices you’ve made.

The Universim is available on Steam now for 29.99 for the standard edition, and 36.98 for the collectors edition!

Simple And Engaging Story

Universim holds itself in a regard where the story is of survival itself. Beyond this, you’re in a position where observing evolution can show us the many operative flaws and traits of a sentient race. To that end, you’ll mostly just be the intervention of godly proportions trying to ensure your civilizations stay alive. While doing this you may run across ancient monsters, aliens, and terrible climate events like firestorms and tornados. For every difficulty, both the creation of your people, known as nuggets, and your own actions can impact how easily they come to pass. Thus, as a story of being the divine intervention of a species, you have the creative liberty to be a kind deity or a destructive one.

The people you take care of in Universim are known as Nuggets. These are faceless off-brand humans who serve to simulate our advances and habits. To this end, they aren’t very smart on their own and thus part of the story is; intervention in leading them. Outside of this, you are simply trying to advance their society, creating government, technology, resources, and improvements for their lives. Perhaps because of this, you aren’t really worried too much about a continuous linear event where you might miss something. Instead, each minor event that your people pray to you for offers a new perspective on your small world.

Divine Gameplay

In essence, Universim is a city builder where you’re thrown into the driver’s seat of the creator. In this role, it’s your job to make sure your world doesn’t go to crap and die off in your care. To achieve this you’ll be given a fair amount of control over your people through godly powers and higher knowledge. Because of this, you become less of a front-line observer and more of a viewer like we would be on a television or video game. However, because of this, you can leave your civilization alone, watching it until the next disaster makes its appearance. Because of this, it’s important to keep track of things like your civilizations resources, and your creator points. Keeping this in mind, Universim clearly prides itself on knowing when to intervene, and when to let your people handle it!

One of the most important aspects of Universim, and one of its strong points is its research and development features. This sees your society go from a primitive culture to something more akin to our modern one. It’s absolutely amazing how many research options exist, however some of them feel out of place. For instance, developing electricity in the primitive era is a bit of a trip from a historical view. Outside of this, each development can either give the society as a whole a new technology, a new habit, or a new evolutionary trait. Through this, we can see that nugget society, much like humanity is as diverse in problem-solving as a whole, though they’re arguably far more advanced.

Well Crafted Graphics

The Universim achieved an incredibly polished state of being, making it aesthetically pleasing to both play and drop a few hours into it. Mixing simplistic animations and designs that have a low poly count with high levels of lighting and shading assistance. In short, giving the game a majestic look both during the day time and night, as each has its own dynamic appearance. When you mix this with the idea of your cities getting more advanced, nothing looks better than seeing your civilization twinkle in the darkness. Beyond this, being from the perspective of a planet you can see the beautiful quality of cosmic events taking place.

Mixing cartoonish characters and event design with the charm of depth, Universim is a pool of beauty to lose yourself in. To this end, everything from your nuggets to the weather has an appearance of grandeur that often gets lost in design. Overall though, it’s wonderful to see that Universim didn’t sacrifice gameplay or beauty for one or the other. Along with this, being incredibly optimized means you won’t run into too many glitches, or problems with the code itself. In fact, the one major gripe that was found during the review period was the occasional game crash expected with new titles.

Because of this open creative boarder; you can easily achieve some beautiful and diverse cities without infringing on potential neighbors.

Amazing Narration And Sound

One of the best aspects of Universim is its narration and music choices. Being something akin to watching old documentaries, or playing a Civilization game, the narrator creates a sense of clear charm. Meanwhile, the simplistic music is both pleasant and pleasing when you’re trying to think about potential hard decisions. These factors alone make for some impactful gameplay that helps ferry the story. Between the many jokes, references, and little puns, the narrator is sure to grow on you not only as an advisor but as a welcomed mechanic. Despite this, at times the music and narration can seem the same, or at the very least very similar to each other after a full play-through.

Other sound effects in Universim offer the player a real sense of scale and power. Fires hold their sucking crackle that threatens to be all-consuming while the lightning strikes have depth and force. Even the tornadoes and blizzards have their ambiance that helps produce a sense of urgency that is reminiscent of their real-life counterparts. Sometimes for titles, it can be hard to master the sound of weather, however, throughout Universim, it’s clear a lot of time was taken to perfect it. As such, it helps build a scale where the god themselves has to fight the nature of their own creation.

The Universim was played on PC via a key given by Crytivo via Keymailer, thank you!