I’m a big fan of simulation games. I always have been. I even enjoyed Spore slightly more than others (despite it being a disappointment). So, when I found out that The Universim from Crytivo had released a playable demo, I was very happy. Sure, there had been a visual tech demonstration available on Steam for ages, but now we can all get to experience The Universim for ourselves.
I downloaded it for myself and took a look around to get a general feel for what they’ve produced so far. The demo gives you the opportunity to build the basics of a town. You have control over where to place things like wells, farms, cemetery’s etc. But the stone huts for the people of your town are built automatically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vau_5e70kGc
Your tribe’s advancement is built upon researching ideas. Some are technological like fire, or water management, while others are genetic changes that will increase your people’s strength, speed, carrying capacity and so on. Each new piece of knowledge takes time to research, in the demo they range from 30 seconds to 4 minutes but I suspect this to be larger as your civilization advances.
Each new world is both generated and acted upon randomly by the game. So each planet is different in the way that the mountains, rivers, coastlines and forests are formed initially. But also, as you play you never know when a plague, fire, or meteor strike plus any number of other incidents are going to occur, and the next planet you play will be a completely different experience.
Crytivo do make it quite clear that the paid version has all the most up-to-date patches and fixes that the demo may not.
“Our vision is clear: we would not encourage anyone looking for the best possible experience to purchase The Universim at this stage, due to it still being a work in progress. We understand that Early Access is not everyone’s cup of tea, and we respect and appreciate that. We are incredibly fortunate to have our amazing community that continues to test and improve the game alongside us every day.”
“Remember, we won’t be directly supporting the demo version with patches. Certain issues were resolved in newer updates, which is why we are avoiding the whole demo patching process, but none of them should be game breaking.”
The demo only has a few of the opening buildings to construct with a handful of things to research. If I’ve wet your whistle for The Universim then hop over to Steam and download their free demo from Steam and take a look for yourselves.
