Universim feels like a lovechild born from Bullfrog's Populous and Sid Meier's Civilization. It scratches the itch that both games did in the day, but does it on a grander scale, much like how Planetary Annihilation did for the Total Annihilation itch. It's a familiar genre at a larger, more complex scale. And so far, it's wonderful at doing that job. It also hearkens back to 22Can's original promises of Godus, but so far this game is actually delivering! The ingame narration hearkens back to the Advisors from Black & White, and really, the game as a whole feels like all the best parts of all the god and civilization building games of the 90s throughout recent times all stirred together in a huge cauldron with very little of the bad.

PROS:
- Very smooth and easy on the CPU, one of the cities from my current playthroughs occupied as good 30% of the planet at this point and despite having only a Geforce 1050TI, I'm still getting more or less solid 60fps.
- The narration that voices everything is for the most part for your benefit. The visual interface uses relatively a simple icon interface to indicate problems or benefits within your civilization as you play.
- Like many modern city builders, you have the ability to pause time and work in a less stressful environment when things start getting complicated.
- Interface feedback, such as being noted where related structures are when placing others of their kind (for example, select a well to place and locations of others are easily marked so you can position them more intuitively).
- Rotating and positioning things is fluid and buildings do not lock to invisible grids, so you are free to be freeform to a point - see below.

CONS:
- While camera control is decent, navigating around your settlements can be confusing as there is no apparent form of minimap or compass. When you need to find a problem in your civilization you might find yourself scrolling around your civilization trying to locate it if it doesn't have an associated problem icon, and when they do, they don't always show up if the problem is 'just over the horizon' in your camera view.
- While the narrator is fun and rather different and capable of being quite funny at times, it also tends to treat your simple mistakes or things that come up with a thick dose of mock pity, which is a bit of a turn-off. Comedy is a good thing, snark is best saved for political commentary made by late night TV hosts.
- In the early game, a road overlay that assumedly will be used later in the game (I have yet to get that far) is superimposed over the landscape whenever you build anything. I am assuming that once you progress to creating roads, they are built on these paths. But why can't we make roads where we want to make them? They run in unusual directions and, going by the footprints of many of even the smallest buildings, none of them properly fit into areas between roads without assumedly breaking the segments (by turning those segments red when trying to lace buildings). Also, when you place down a building, there's two sets of dotted lines surrounding the 'blueprint' before you place. What do these mean? One is obviously the footprint of the building itself, but what's the other one? Space for... sidewalks?

The game is still progressing much the same way as Godus was, from the past through to the future. I have high hopes for this and really hope it doesn't end up getting dropped, but Crytivo has a decent track record in my books and I'm confident that this will progress into something great. :)

Universim feels like a lovechild born from Bullfrog's Populous and Sid Meier's Civilization. It scratches the itch that both games did in the day, but does it on a grander scale, much like how Planetary Annihilation did for the Total Annihilation itch. It's a familiar genre at a larger, more complex scale. And so far, it's wonderful at doing that job. It also hearkens back to 22Can's original promises of Godus, but so far this game is actually delivering! The ingame narration hearkens back to the Advisors from Black & White, and really, the game as a whole feels like all the best parts of all the god and civilization building games of the 90s throughout recent times all stirred together in a huge cauldron with very little of the bad. PROS: - Very smooth and easy on the CPU, one of the cities from my current playthroughs occupied as good 30% of the planet at this point and despite having only a Geforce 1050TI, I'm still getting more or less solid 60fps. - The narration that voices everything is for the most part for your benefit. The visual interface uses relatively a simple icon interface to indicate problems or benefits within your civilization as you play. - Like many modern city builders, you have the ability to pause time and work in a less stressful environment when things start getting complicated. - Interface feedback, such as being noted where related structures are when placing others of their kind (for example, select a well to place and locations of others are easily marked so you can position them more intuitively). - Rotating and positioning things is fluid and buildings do not lock to invisible grids, so you are free to be freeform to a point - see below. CONS: - While camera control is decent, navigating around your settlements can be confusing as there is no apparent form of minimap or compass. When you need to find a problem in your civilization you might find yourself scrolling around your civilization trying to locate it if it doesn't have an associated problem icon, and when they do, they don't always show up if the problem is 'just over the horizon' in your camera view. - While the narrator is fun and rather different and capable of being quite funny at times, it also tends to treat your simple mistakes or things that come up with a thick dose of mock pity, which is a bit of a turn-off. Comedy is a good thing, snark is best saved for political commentary made by late night TV hosts. - In the early game, a road overlay that assumedly will be used later in the game (I have yet to get that far) is superimposed over the landscape whenever you build anything. I am assuming that once you progress to creating roads, they are built on these paths. But why can't we make roads where we want to make them? They run in unusual directions and, going by the footprints of many of even the smallest buildings, none of them properly fit into areas between roads without assumedly breaking the segments (by turning those segments red when trying to lace buildings). Also, when you place down a building, there's two sets of dotted lines surrounding the 'blueprint' before you place. What do these mean? One is obviously the footprint of the building itself, but what's the other one? Space for... sidewalks? The game is still progressing much the same way as Godus was, from the past through to the future. I have high hopes for this and really hope it doesn't end up getting dropped, but Crytivo has a decent track record in my books and I'm confident that this will progress into something great. :)