The Universim

i would recomend to players with time to spend and a strong computer

If you enjoyed Black & White back in the day, you will likely enjoy this. No creature to slap/pet, but a god to a civilization. Smite or favor?

I spend most of my time waiting, nothing happens, just waiting. I need my population to grow. I wait, I constantly assign couples to try and increase the population, it rises at a snails pace. Waiting, waiting, waiting. That's all this game is and it's not fun sadly.

Do you want to be God? Good. Do you also want to have to be constricted by a progression system and time/ resource management? Also Good. Do you want to Envitable Fail and curse yourself for starting to far away from a stone source? No. Wait.. No. OH well Try it anyways and just dont make that mistake.

If you really like games like this you may enjoy it, but otherwise you probably will not. It's kind of cool to play through once and I could see myself returning to it, but overall it feels more like a civilization simulation rather than a game with too many meaningful choices.

TL;DR: if you don't plan to sink hundreds of hours into this game, it's fun enough for the price. Past that me complaining why I couldn't clear 100% of the game (I've lost my patience with the late game tedium).
Overall game is fun to play to the end at least once. And maybe one extra time to try out unlockable settlers and special planet mode. I wish special planet actually existed on space map, or if it does it's way too far from mother planet. Game mechanics are made with mindset of looking pretty and cinematic rather than adding gameplay value. You have to micromanage increasingly more things as time progresses, taking away from feeling that you create a self sustaining civilization. That's somewhat explained by the fact that nuggets are dumb and your whole purpose is to prevent their own self-destruction, but it does take away from late game.
So addressing problems from my first paragraph: game doesn't really have repeatability or late game. I wish devs at least made enough "unique" planets for "10 colonies" achievement to smooth out the boredom. There's no point to colonization past "plot objective". I wish there was at least something like space tech related to new planets or unique resources to give off some sense of progression.
There's no point restating, unless you want to try starting with one of special nuggets. I'm somewhat spoiled that for myself because I've unlocked them early in development. Your starting settlers die out VERY FAST so you don't even get that going for you. Grave dodgers are only ones that survive long enough to hit middle+ stage of the game. There was an attempt to add variance by forcing tech choke points where you have to pick things that are pretty much just differently colored crayons. By the way that also takes away from late game, because some tech that gets locked away would be useful in different colonization scenarios. Except for prisons. That's just flavour.
Cinematic, but uncomfortable UI that isn't made for micromanagement of nuggets adds to overall tedium.
So if you don't plan to sink hundreds of hours into this game, it's fun enough for the price.

Amazing game super fun to play and very addicting once you start. 10/10 recommend!

TLDR; Don't waste money on this, wishlist, and wait for the game "Fata Deum"

Seems a little railroading for a "god game", controls are nice, but the general content is lacking. It's a city builder like Sim City, plop down a building, your people will do stuff on their own. Once you get the "AI" (government) you can automate core building production like electricity, water, and defense, everything to a point where all you're doing is placing advanced factories and mines for them. Very boring, little substance, it's hard getting invested when everything is hard time locked, to a point where you build up your city as big as it can be, then wait like 30 minutes just to get a few more buildings that you finish incorporating into your city within a few minutes. Seems designed less like a fun game, and more like an insidious time waster.

Add on to that, two of the most staple things in any city builder: Housing and roads. Both more or less dictate where you place the rest of your buildings, and how, but you have direct control over neither of these. Nuggets make their own houses, all on their own, all over the fucking place. There's a power you get later that makes them "build housing in the general vicinity of it" but it only half works and lasts a few minutes tops, more busy work to try and withstand the time grind.
If you demolish a house, they instantly pop one somewhere on the edge of your city, and within a few hours tops you get to the point where you really just don't care, and stop expanding to accomodate them, letting people on the outskirts die and repopulate in cycles until you've wasted enough time to unlock another building that makes it worth expanding in earnest.

Roads? Rail-roads. It's a system designed on the planet itself instead of the way you want it. Again, all automatic, despite being integral for not only the looks of your city, but the functionality, since they ofc give a movespeed bonus. If you place a building in the way of where a road will be auto-placed, it wipes all the surrounding roads away too, and those can take forever to come back even after removing the building. The only good thing about this system is the auto-building houses don't get in the way of the auto-building roads. But because the game, again, automatically decides where your building space is, you can't block anything out, make certain districts, and sometimes you run out of space in an area because either the roads changed where they are now, or somebody fucking built a house there!

The game is super duper fun only problem is that you need a computer strong enough to handle the processing power required for the game to play smoothly

this is my dream game it has infinite possibilities of fun gameplay fully worth the 20 bucks

My all time favourite game on steam, this game is amazing. I really can't express how amazing this game is.

Pros:
-Soundtrack
-God game
-Narrator
-Indie Game
-Graphics
-Easy to use Camera
-Shaking House when mating ;)

Cons:
-Performance is a bit crappy at times
-Nuggets drink from lake when there is reservoir right in front of them :(
-Can get Repetitive
-Nuggets are dumb
-Planet gets polluted when you aren't on it

Please get this game, because it deserves more attention. It took the developers 10 years to make and the game is so peaceful and a huge time-sucker. Also shirtless Adahy ;))

meh. The game is cool but the updates are slow and add little to nothing. they could add so much more but decide to give us a mod option that is very basic and not enough people to make any worth using.

Every single thing that qualifies this as a God game is immediately locked. It forcefully spoon foods you the most basic game controls. It's just not the game it advertises itself as. Hard pass.

you can go on power trip and destroy stuff and stuff and it is kinda cool also you are god and you can sacrifice people and yeah and its cool

Love it. I do kinda wish there was a construction que so we can see where building projects were as far as progress

The Universim is a delightful and engaging game that feels like a modern evolution of classics like Populous. The meta-story is both fun and thought-provoking, offering a reflective twist that kept me hooked. If you're familiar with games like Black & White, Spore, or Populous, the gameplay is generally intuitive and well-crafted, making it easy to dive into the interactive experience.
Aesthetically, the game shines with a cute, exaggerated style that perfectly matches the developers' quirky sense of humor. It’s a charming blend of visuals and personality. I’d highly recommend The Universim to fans of Populous, Spore, or Black & White—it’s a fresh take on the god-game genre that’s well worth your time!

Funny but serious at times, great game but i feel like you should have a little bit more control over what your nuggets do like where to build houses where to build the roads, not just build random water containers or whatever wherever they want.

Also the medieval stage is modeled and done pretty wrong i mean how is there electricity in the medieval stage that is just stupid, other than that is a great game.

fun but YOU MUST HAVE A PHISICAL MOUS yep

I've had this game for many years, and I must say. It does not disappoint.

this game is perfect for anyone who likes city builders.

One huge flaw in the game mechanics stops my enjoyment of this game that is otherwise mediocre

Roads

Seriously? a new planet already has the whole planets road system mapped out in a random way that you can't change that stops you planning your city properly - can't place that here there is a road in the way

Honestly not a very fun game. It lies somewhere half-way between God-like game and a city builder, but it's good at neither. My first save became corrupted when everyone turned into zombies and died, and no matter how far back I went I couldn't seem to prevent this - I tried to create a second world, but it was boring to develop the early stages again and I kind of never got past that. Not a great game, not recommended.

Well, it seemed like a fun game starting out, but it just gets frustrating as time goes on.
Resource management is almost nonexistent, i don't know how many electronics my civilization has, i can't figure out why my iron mines are seemingly producing not enough iron, or my glass plants aren't producing enough glass. I made several gas mines(why does gas get turned into glass anyway? lol) and clicking on the glass factories seems to show it's producing, but i never have enough.

There's many flaws in the later game, I haven't even got to space, because i have a ton of buildings lined up for construction and no resources to build them. I buy from the black market constantly(which apparently is just free? Idk, i don't get the black market lol) and never seem to have enough resources. All my plants are running, i can see them producing steel and whatnot, but it's never fast enough.

The building management screen is sloppy and unorganized and unsorted, so it's hard to confirm, say, how many eateries you have. And there's no way to find destroyed buildings easily and repair them.

Also, INFECTED ZONES?! These are basically dead bodies that just "infect" a certain area. Do people not clean up their dead bodies? Why do they just leave them laying around and walk through them and get diseases! I thought cemeteries would solve this, and they either don't, or aren't very efficient at it.. You have to pick them up manually and throw them in a cemetery.

This game is very fun at the start, i would say once you get around 100 nuggets is when the fun factor plummets. And that kinda makes me sad, i would like to go explore space since that's seemingly the purpose of this game, but because of the awful resource management, i can't even build a spaceport.

I am really enjoying this game. I t reminds me of an old game called act raiser, without the side-scroller fight mode. You pretty much get the entire premise of the game from their shop page, so you get what you pay for. Try not to be too malicious and kill all your nuggets. It's really tempting to wreak havoc.

The idea behind the game is solid. The game is beautiful, narrator is also supreme. What makes me put a "No" - it's the game is extremely slow and eventually boring.

Main problem is, there's no way to permanently boost research. Something like building universities would make sense and would incentivise people to grow population faster, etc. But no, the devs decided that entire progress of your civilization is simply time-locked. You play for 10 minutes - you get another upgrade. You play 8 more - here's a new building for you.

Sure, there's a way to speed up the game - 2 times - which is not that much making you wait for 4-5 minutes for everything you research. There's also temporary 30% boost to research via elections. But that's literally it.

So you build every building available, you already looked around the planet for all asteroids (free lootboxes), it does not really matter if your nuggets are reproducing or not at this point, you just sit there starting at the timer to unlock yet another building. Periodically there's a disaster, sort of like in Rimworld which are pretty fun. But other than that - you just sit waiting for things to finish researching.

Finally I looked at the research tree, calculated how long it will take me to reach anything interesting, and just gave up.

.... while trying to figure how to make clean water, suddenly voice of god : "what are you staring at :@"
Reason , while i was trying to find spot for water on screen 2 cavements started to make third one...

This game has a lot of issues... I don't understand why I'm not even in the medieval age and I'm building a battery for Tesla?

Love the game. Nice, cute and relaxing. Would recommend at any time.

Treat yourself with some power :-)

Such a fun game. A little slow at first, but once you unlock more things, it becomes that much more fun.

The tech tree doesn't make literal sense but good narrative sense. I love it.

the space portion still feels pretty half baked with plenty of bugs when it comes to how resources are managed on other planets while your away

This is an easy game to hyper-focus on. Starts a little slow as you wait for more nuggets to work at the different places, but it gets faster as the game goes on.

love the voice and gameplay but i play it cause of the voice i find them funny and nice

This a really fun colony sim with a lot of things to love about it. I love the art style and the way the game looks, it's very colorful and as someone who grew up with Spore, it's reminiscent of that in the best way. The game also has a great sense of humor and lots of funny easter eggs.

so much fun to play, love my nuggets and the narrator!

Amazing game! I wonder how big can my universe be :)
worth every $

Nice game besides the fact that no matter what I do the telekinesis tool does not work, even when following what people say to make it work. I tried everything yet it just hates me.

It is great to find a little God game to spend some time in.

Seems like this would be fun.
But if I put it down for a while, and come back, my saved game is gone.
Cannot recommend because of this.

plays like a completely confused idle game
There is not much to do and what has to be done is a bit obscured. Every time I had/wanted to do something I had to click through a couple of menus to find where it was again.
First the player does not know what is expected from him. Build new buildings? Give some orders? What has to be done? Do I have to care why the guys only collect stone but no wood?
But soon there is a town hall and guys are assigned automatically to buildings.
Later different types of ministries are unlocked that also take care of creating new buildings.
Great, confusion is resolved as nothing is left to do for the player but to watch the game unfold. Except there is not much to unfold.

I don't know what games the devs normally play but i would expect the space key as generally accepted pause key for such games?! Sure I can rebind the key but didn't bother to put even this bit of effort. Just mentioning as it is one of several bits adding to the 'huh?! whatever' moments in the game.

I got the game early in EA because i expected it becomes simulation of a whole planet's ecoystem. I cannot blame the game for my expectation but it didn't get even close to this.
It is not even in-depth simulation but actually quite shallow.

Animals just spawn randomly. there is no actual ecosystem so it doesn't matter
Random events just happenly... ok asteroids may seem to appear out of nowhere but it is so ridiculous outdated to just spawn a pack of aggro wolves somewhere. a huge set back for immersion
Well, immersion... there is some walking trees running around and suddenly my town got a black market... actually it was a alien space ship landing in my town and selling me some blueprints for world wonders. So much to 'simulation' of civilization
There is a tutorial for the alien black market but I got stuck to 'press trade' because it does nothing
Streets, something every city sim has, do also exist but they are pre-defined at start of the game. Not sure even what the purpose of those streets is as guys running everywhere anyways. Maybe just cosmetics?! Unfortunately the streets don't look natural, don't look good, just ridiculous.

This game is ok but i've been playing this game since 2023 and i still have not been able to get anywhere close to getting to space, I have even used cheats and still havn't been able to. even to this day I still havn't gotten to space.

Really fun and you can customize the difficulty level which is fun to try to handle the more difficult situations. I love this game!

very fun and entertaining but if you can handle a process that takes a long time get ready because "this game.. you're not ready for it"

The game has a natural progression system and a gameplay loop that is fun and satisfying up until you reach a little bit into the mid point of the modern age at which point it ends up like a lot of games do and it runs out of content. The narrator barely ever pipes in. There's no narrative structural progression of any kind. What progression system is still there (for colonizing other planets) is so slow and tedious and boring that it starts to feel like an idle game.

If I have to sum up the problem and the solution in one sentence for the developers for future updates it would be this: The game needs to be more sussinct or you need more gameplay features for the player to account for once they reach modern/space/colonization stage of the game.

If you like playing games you never finish then enjoy.
But if you like to actually reach some kind of a "end point" of the game where you wrap it up and move on then steer clear of Universim.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☑ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☑ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Super fun, strategic, and your decisions matter while you build your civilization, the narrator is a good touch and its fun to see how big your city gets

This game is the perfect time killer. Lovely graphics and game-play. And the humor is right on par with older games of the same type.

10/10.

A Well-Polished Turd

I picked up The Universim after having it on my wishlist for a very long time, since it was quite early in early access. I'm a huge fan of god games (underexplored as the genre sadly is) and of city-builders, and have gotten plenty of fun out of sandbox style games in the past. Upon initially starting, I was excited; the art style is reminiscent of Spore, in a good way. A little less cartoony, but still vibrant and with lots of distinctive designs for creatures, buildings, and the landscape.

Then gameplay started and everything went downhill from there.

Despite the tagline for this game being a question "what would you do with the power?", the game has made it quite clear what it presumes you're going to do, as it saddles you with a misanthropic and sadistic narrator that makes it quite clear how much he despises both the nuggets (the people) you're in charge of and you, the player. It completely undermines the tone of the game to place down a hospital or whatever and receive snide remarks or open hostility for actually trying to engage with the city building mechanics. The worst part of the narrator though is the way a voice line plays every time a "busy" house of nuggets happens to be on screen. Which happens. All. The. Time. And the humor is so stale even Adam Sandler would groan.

The game just also mechanically, kind of sucks. The tech tree seems to have been made by someone who overheard the concept of a tech tree once in passing and guessed at the rest, then shuffled everything around for the hell of it. You'll be pumping oil in the Stone Age but won't be domesticating animals until the Modern Age. It makes no sense whatsoever, and completely robs you of any sense of growing your civilization from simple beginnings into an increasingly complex one. Especially with how much of the design is taken out of your hands. Like the placements of the *roads*. And you sort of have to hand over an increasing amount of city design to the game as things progress anyway, because the UI is completely inadequate for keeping track of things like total capacity vs usage of buildings like schools and hospitals, food/water use rate and distribution, or total assigned nuggets to a given job.

But hey, it's not technically a city builder! That's mechanically the main gameplay and everything but, technically, it's a god game! So let's judge it by that standard. Lets see. No customization of your godly style, your temple, or any sort of decorations. No narrative. Belief is basically arbitrary. A handful of disjointed quests that amount to busywork. Well, what about the powers? The destructive powers are the most numerous, naturally, because the developers assumed everyone would want to be throwing around fire and lightning I guess. Otherwise you've got basically nothing to do. You can pick things up. Yippee. Oh, and heal nuggets, of course. And play eugenics with them. Uhh. Hmm. Maybe it's better that the devs *don't* try to come up with original ideas.

Overall it's a very pretty piece of nothing. I made the poop joke in the title mostly so I could bring up the fact that there is an extremely vile poop joke front and center in the farming mechanics that you cannot avoid or rename. That's the level of "humor" we're dealing with here. I guess I'll go look longingly at the Fata Deum store page again and see if it has a release date yet.

I really like this game and the gameplay is fun. But there is absolutely nothing to bring you back to playing again. Games like this need to be failed over and over again with a roguelite progression system where you earn points to be spent later on to make it a little easier each time or slightly differently. The same box custom side of the game of the last patch is a move in the wrong direction imo. There needs to be less control that you earn over time or more power. Devs i doubt you will ever read this, but please change the game to as I mentioned. It's not a massive amount of change and certainly something you can build upon with the ability to add more changes, events or circumstances through the gameplay that could end a run or make it funny or better.

This is the best game ive played that allowed me to be a god and grow from dirt to science.... thats not civ

Great game for beginners to the God-sim genre. This is a really fun game and I enjoy watching my nuggets just do stuff on their own alot. Good game to chill and play!