Building a World: The Universim

The Universim continues it’s promising growth with an early access alpha showcasing some of the early game-play.  Moving beyond the previously released tech demo, this early build brings many of the promises of the developers, Crytivo Games, to life.

It’s a small world afterall.

Though this early release is quite limited, it’s full to the brim with potential.  After establishing your first early settlement, your people, or “nuggets” get set to work as assigned by you through the simple UI.  Whether they start gathering food, stone, or start building and expanding is up to you.  Each nugget can be assigned to these roles dynamically, and can be changed at any time depending on your current needs.

Your nuggets will go off to work, and require little attention from you.  Though you are to decide where and when to build certain advanced structures, your nuggets in Universim will decide where new houses are going to be built, and where they will go to gather resources.  This makes choosing your starting point very important so as to not have your nuggets wondering miles to collect wood or stone.

The dynamic planetary weather system is also key in your early decisions.  Each planet has it’s own unique environment and weather patterns.  A quick look at the available overlays will show you wind patterns, and temperature patterns to give you insight as to where to build.  Cloud and storm systems will travel across the landscape dropping rain, snow and occasional lightning across the land.  Placing your starting town in areas where storms are common, or where the temperatures drop greatly during the winter can be deadly early on.  Crytivo also promises random events will litter the surface with earthquakes, storms, volcanoes and the such throughout your game.

Them’s storm clouds a brewin’

Your nuggets are also dynamic, and each have their own thoughts and emotions.  In later game areas you’ll have to manage all of these aspects to keep a happy tribe together, and you can expect even more problematic issues coming up as you advance into the the modern age and expand across the planet surface.  People in The Universim will live thier lives, grow old and die.  As they age their stats will change to reflect this.  Young Nuggets are fast on their feet and able to carry more produce around, but as they age they slow down, and carry little to nothing.  Clicking on each one will show their stats and a quick biography of their family, and how many children they have.

Future depth to explore

A basic research tree is also available in this release, showcasing three trees of growth available to your society.  There is nothing really new here as most of the early technologies are fairly straightforward and lead to more abilities and buildings.  It will be interesting to see what direction The Universim goes with as you move into the modern and advanced ages.

Come, meet the family

This early build gives a great preview into the potential of The Universim.  The game runs smoothly with a limited amount of bugs, and the groundwork has been laid well for the basic functions of the game.  I’m really looking forward to the various additions forthcoming that will add more layers of challenge to the game.  We haven’t seen a really great ‘God” game in awhile and they have always been one of my favorite genres.  Crytivo games has their hands full with The Universim, but my early impression is that they are the right hands.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to share your comments below about The Universim.  Make sure to subscribe to me on YouTube for future updates!  Previous preview can be found here!

To get early access visit The Universim and opt in as an backer for immediate access to the Pre-Alpha build.

Follow @CrytivoGames, @TheUniversim

 

All Things End: Kingdom – Review

All things end.  This is the tagline for Kingdom, a simple, pixel art tower defense game with a whole lot of charm.  It’s a whimsical journey into a vast land laid before you to conquer or fall depending on the choices you make.

This is the tutorial, that’s it, now go!

Almost everything in Kingdom is simple, except for success.  As you drop into the simple, but detailed pixel art world, you’ll be given a short tutorial as to the basic functions in your procedurally generated world, with your also random king or queen.  A few lines of text are all the instruction you get as you ride into the world.  The concepts are simple too, collect gold coins throughout the world, and either give them to the denizens surrounding your camp, or use them to purchase and upgrade your camp itself.

You start with enough gold to start a basic camp, recruit a couple of peasants, upgrade them to archers or builders, and build basic defenses.  From that point you have to figure things out on your own.  Kingdom does nothing to let you know what to do next, except to explore, expand and survive.

As the sun arcs across the sky, and becomes night, the survival aspect becomes clear.  Each night you will be randomly attacked by strange creatures.  These creatures will throw themselves against your fortifications and steal gold coins and equipment from your peasants.  If they attack your liege you will lose any coins you may be carrying, and eventually they will knock the very crown from your head.  If you are unable to retrieve the crown before one of the demons does, it’s game over.  These attacks will randomly include a red moon, which brings more fiends and creepy flying beasts that will literally suck up your workers and carry them into the night.

Well this can’t be good…

If you haven’t prepared well enough during the day, these attacks can be devastating, even if survived.  It was common during my play-through’s to simply abandon hours of work after a severe attack as it would be nearly impossible to rebuild in time.

As you expand your kingdom outwards, and grow your encampment, you’ll find alters and monuments throughout the world that will assist you.  The game however makes you experiment with these the first time around to figure out what they do.  After a few runs however, you’ll discover that there are only a few of these and you’ll stop finding surprises.  The only thing that will change from run to run, will be the location of these monuments, but eventually with enough planning and patience you will be able to unlock everything regardless.  This felt like a missed opportunity from the developers to throw in new snags to each game of Kingdom by either limiting which monuments spawn, or by throwing in a few others with random properties that may or may not spawn with each game.  This would have added a nice layer of replay-ability beyond just the random spawn locations.

Check out this hilarious play-through from Weird Wizard Dave

Because of these limitations, once you get the idea of the game, only you, the player can create new challenges for yourself.  It’s fairly easy to create a bustling kingdom if you know how, and it’s easy to repeat the steps over and over in order to reach the game’s win condition of protecting the crown.  Once you figure this out, the only challenge remaining is to create your own obstacles by deciding where not to spend your coins and where to make the game harder.  The lack of a difficulty setting, or more random events or options puts a big limit on Kingdom’s longevity.

Other issues that reside in Kingdom is the balance of pace, and the usefulness of your liege.  As king, or queen, your only ability is to collect and spend coins to recruit and build.  As night falls, all you can do is watch to see if you did enough during the day to survive.  There is very little interaction or any real type of micromanagement available beyond deciding what to build, when and where.  These means a lot of long nights where you either watch your defenses mow through dozens of enemies, or see your kingdom fall as all you can do is run around and try to avoid being taken down yourself.  The rest of the time, you’ll find yourself running back and forth through your eventually massive kingdom to collect the necessary coins to expand to the next wall or point of interest.  Near the end, it can take you a whole day of game time to simply run from one end of your kingdom to another.

Progress!

Issues aside, Kingdom is still a very solid game.  Though it eventually lacks some re-play-ability and the pace isn’t always great, most of these issues can be easily solved through creating your own challenges, or potential updates down the road from the developer Noio.  The procedurally generated world, and learning curve will still give you hours of play time in order to secure your crown.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to share your experiences with Kingdom below in the comments.

Follow Noio on Twitter for more information on Kingdom and other projects

Another great Indie Game!

Review: Reassembly

Reassembly, a 2 dimensional space sim from developer Anisoptera Games with a load of charm.  An exploration sim with building mechanics that lets you explore a procedurally generated galaxy.  As you explore you collect resources and build bigger and better ships to better handle your expanding influence.

The basic premise is pretty simple.  Choosing a basic starting ship and colors to stand out, you’re dropped into the galaxy near some friendly units to start your exploration.  The tutorial guides you through basic game-play to get you started.  From it’s top down perspective, Reassembly has you gathering resources from local meteors and strange space plants that can be returned to owned bases to be converted into more useful resources.

Damaged bases can be captured to help spawn more friendly NPC’s to assist you against the many enemy ships scattered around space.  Unless a ship shares yoru colors they are enemies, and will attack on sight.  More resources can be gained from combat as you destroy these enemies.

Combat in Reassembly is fast and fun.  Ships fly around irradically across the screen depending on their design, firing all sorts of different weapons, from lasers to torpedoes, to chain guns and more. This fast pace is fun and frantic, and though there is little strategy here, you still have to make sure to maneuver smartly around to best take advantage of gun placements and armor.  Armor is mounted all around your ship and can take a certain amount of damage.  As the armor is damaged, it flies off exposing more critical components of your ship.  If you can avoid getting hit long enough, your ship will slowly pull it’s pieces back together again and recover, otherwise expect to be blown up and re-spawning at a nearby friendly base.

Custom grill maybe?

Customization in Reassembly is not only just a visual change, it’s a necessity if you are going to survive exploring the galaxy.  As you gain resources, you will also earn “C” which are used to buy new components for your ship.  These can include weapons, new armor or useful components.  When you enter the customization screen, you’ll find your ship layed out in closeup.  Each component you can utilize has various stick points you can use to connect it to any other component.  It’s very easy to add or subtract parts or weapons you want to and build pretty much whatever you like within the 2 dimensional interface.

The amount and type of parts you can use, is limited by your ship’s “P” which you can upgrade with “C” along the way.  This allows you to add more weapons, armor or utilities  and make larger and larger ships.  It also allows you to add more ships to your fleet.  These are NPC’s that will follow you around and help you in battles.

Lots of parts to choose from and upgrade

The customization screen is where the strategy really exists in Reassembly.  You must carefully build your ship to take advantage of weapon range, direction, and firing means, while balancing armor around your vessel to ensure you can take some damage as you go.  You can also specialize ships for resource gathering or other beneficial specs if you like, or build a jack-of-all-trades ship otherwise.  Each component has multiple sticking points so you can be fairly creative within the 2D limitation.   All throughout you will also need to balance your ship’s energy generation ability to power your weapons and make sure your fighting ability is not hindered by a lack of power.  There are also various pre-built ships you can use as is, or as a starting point for something else.

The colorful visuals for Reassembly keep you engaged at all times.  Explosions fill the screen.  Thrusters burn through space, and the various weapon effects are all unique and make it easy to see what’s coming at you.  The quiet, ambient music helps fill the void of space without adding more to the frantic experience.  The HUD is informative without spoiling the view.  In the top right hand corner you can see  a live closeup of your ship, including any damage that may be accruing so that you can move to avoid death if you’re quick enough.

I can’t hold her together! I’m an engineer not a miracle worker!

Reassembly does a solid job of being fairly easy to learn, but also giving enough customization that those who want to spend hours building the perfect ship can do so equally easily.  It’s simple but fun graphics mean you have a smooth experience throughout with little slow down or hiccups regardless of how much is going on on the screen.  The unlimited replay-ability will have you coming back often to try out new tactics or ship designs.  This is definitely worth checking out if you are into space exploration sims.

As always, thanks for reading, and be sure to comment and like in the space below!

For more fun indie games with a space twist check out Cosmonautica

Subnautica: Early Access Review

Tired of punching trees and looking for rocks to build a campfire?  Then Subnautica is the survival game for you.  Subnautica throws you into a vast ocean full of dangers and mystery and tasks you with not only surviving, but finding out what went wrong to get you stranded there.

Well it could be worse…

As seemingly the sole survivor of your terraforming mission after an explosion sends your craft on a collision course into a planet with an endless ocean, Subnautica’s first objective is survival.  Like most survival games, you must quickly find resources to help you stay alive in the game’s varied environments.  The trick with Subnautica is that all of these environments are submerged which adds a unique twist to the genre.  Not only are you managing the usual things like thirst and hunger, you are also limited at first by your capability to carry an air supply below the surface.  This adds an extra layer of danger to your chances as each dive could be your last if you don’t time everything right.

Subnautica does a good job early on with making things seem both familiar but very alien all at once.  Set in the far future with advanced technology that can craft items in seconds with a fabricator, you are still made quite familiar with the basic components needed to craft these high tech items.  Throughout the ocean environments you will find various of these resources strewn about on the ocean floor, lime deposits holding various metals and minerals, salt deposits, corral, and other useful flora, and of course fish.

The beautiful sunset…

The animals of the ocean are where the alien concept of the planet first shows it’s colours.  The fauna of the planet are incredibly diverse and alien like.  They vary from small and fast fish, and uniquely useful Airsacks, which are very useful early on, and quite harmless, to large predators you need to avoid, to small exploding fish, to massive whale like creatures so big and slow corral has formed on their backs.  The fauna AI ranges from passive, to very aggressive, and the day and night cycle affects this nature as well.  Fishing for small fish at night for example may have you find several sleeping and easy to catch.

Once basic survival is covered, advanced resources like titanium and silicone will allow you to build both structures and vehicles.  As most materials can be very rare, with enough patience you can build underwater craft, and even submarines to help you search the ocean bottom.  Surviving long term means manufacturing parts to build your own underwater base via  a network of tube parts that you can connect together, and even draw oxygen to from the surface.   Later equipment even allows you to terraform the environment to you liking, or dig holes through ocean floor.

All the while in the distance stands the ship you arrived in, the Aurora, where the yet to be completed end game seemingly will exist.  Surrounded by radiation, and protected by massive mutated squid like creatures, the Aurora plays an integral part in the gameplay.  Not only is the ship filled with various high tech components to be grabbed once you have the right tools to do so, but it also affects the nearby environment.  The various radiation leaks in the craft result in regular explosions, which litter the ocean with components and larger explorable pieces of the Aurora where various components can be found.  It also seems like a bad idea to be too close to the Aurora when one of these explosions occurs.

Oh, my bad, things can get worse

It looks like we still have a bit of a wait to see what mysterious affect brought down the Aurora, but there is still enough here in Subnautica to keep most people busy for several hours.  The potential for some type of end game in the survival genre is always a welcome feature as it sets goals for the player to reach, rather than have them simply build bigger and better structures to ease their survival.  Thought the environments are well built and colorful, they do sometimes still lack some life, as several areas are not well filled with lifeforms.  Generally each area has but a handful of fish floating around at any time, and I have yet to encounter huge school of fish, or any bottom dwelling creatures crawling around to add variety.  These will all hopefully be things we see added in upcoming updates.

Crafting in style

Available now in Early Access, Subnautica adds a fresher flavour to the somewhat overfull survival genre.  With colorful graphics and environments, and a unique survival protocol taking place almost entirely underwater, this game is a  lot of fun.  Though the game still lacks some content, regular features are added, and with a potential end game in store there is a lot to explore here.

Want more?  Check out Stranded Deep!  Don’t forget to comment and like below, let me know what you thought of Subnautica. 

Don’t Starve Together: Beta Review

What makes a great game like Don’t Starve better? Why playing with friends of course. Journey into the world of Don’t Starve with up to 5 friends in Don’t Starve Together. This standalone expansion brings with it a whole new style of play to explore the strange and wonderful world of Don’t starve.

If you are not familiar with the gameplay of Don’t Starve, the concept is simple. Your character is dropped in the middle of a strange wilderness and you must use your wits and whatever else you may have brought with you to survive. Don’t starve Together removes some of the story of the original, but the basic concept remains the same. You, and your friends, are dropped through a portal into a random area of the procedurally generated map. You are immediately tasked with finding the basic resources to survive. With the day and night clock running, you need to do so quickly before the darkness sets in, and you are relatively helpless.

A very eclectic bunch of people

This is where the sense of balance from the original game can sometimes feel off. The original game has enough resources scattered around the spawn areas for you to usually be okay the first night or two so long as you are careful. You have only one mouth to feed, and a small pool of skills to use depending on which character you have unlocked, and in play. With Don’t Starve Together, you are open to choosing from among the entire cast of eclectic characters from the original game, and the DLC, Reign of Giants. This early access to all the characters gives an interesting chance to mix and match various skills together to see if they can coexist. This process however is often hit and miss, as the resources available early on, are much different than what you would find in the single player game. This often means that you spend a lot more time harvesting basic items like food, as you need to travel farther to collect enough for two or more mouths to feed.

Famous last word?

When you do find a good balance of skills between your characters the game shines. For instance mixing Wigfrid’s combat skills and good starting armour with Wickerbottom’s smarts allows you to quickly build an advance base and defend if you work together well. And yes, all the playable character’s names start with ‘W’. Pick the wrong combination however, and even good teamwork can lead to frustrating death, upon death.

Yep, death by penguin

Really though, this game is meant to be played with friends. The game worlds available to drop into are varied, and many run with different settings and mods and figuring out how to survive with strangers, or just avoid them and make your own spot in the world has it’s moments. When it comes down to it however, the best aspect of Don’t Starve Together is going in with a group of friends and experiencing the weird and wonderful world. With a good set of friends, the general wit and humour of Don’t Starve, it’s impossible not to have fun, even when one of your friends accidentally dies after running directly into a wolves den, or opening a mysterious chest that suddenly begins winter.

Graphically there is no difference between either version of Don’t Starve. Don’t Starve together however includes the full content of the original game’s DLC as well as some new items, creatures and biomes to explore. The game runs relatively smooth, with only a minor amount of lag up to the 6 player limit. Though it is possible to allow more players onto a server, the game becomes unplayable due to lag, and latency issues.

Fighting off night Terrors

The Dev team at Klei Entertainment are quite active, and as this game is still officially in beta I am sure they will iron out the balance wrinkles. They may even be able to expand past the 6 player maximum. If you enjoyed Don’t Starve, there is absolutely no reason why you won’t enjoy Don’t Starve Together. For new players to the game, it gives a unique opportunity to work with others to learn the mechanics, or have a friend help you start off. Overall this is a great addition to this game’s universe and I can’t wait to jump in with my friends and play some more.

Thanks for reading as usual, and be sure to comment and share below, and let me know what you thought about Don’t Starve Together.

Don’t forget to follow @TheNeoNerdBlog on Twitter, and Subscribe to his channel for more funny videos like this one.

And while you are here, check out my preview of World Of Warships, a great looking upcoming multiplayer battle sim.

Grave: Preview

Doesn’t’ look that grave

Grave.  Grave is spooky as hell.  Grave is currently available as a very early demo awaiting Steam greenlight for early release.  An atmospheric horror game, Grave will lull you into rest, then throw you for a loop.  The game is developed independently by Broken Window Studios.  This is their first venture into full development, and went the crowdfunding way to get Grave started.

Set near a seemingly abandoned mining town, Grave will challenge you to keep your wits.  With a solid visual style, you will slowly traverse through the desert and mines to explore your surroundings.  Though it starts out bright and hazy, things quickly change for the worse.  While exploring an abandoned house, I found my first set of matches, leaving the mostly empty desert behind as I entered.  As I came back to door of the house, the environment around me had shifted and there were giant half destroyed structures everywhere.  These images quickly dissipated like a mirage.  These visual cues are sometimes the scariest part of Grave.

Explore the abandoned building? Sure, why could go wrong?  I mean what… what could go wrong?

The sound  here is on equal footing with the visuals.  The music and environmental effects have you spinning around often to make sure there isn’t something behind you.  When the first real monster arrives, the horrible shriek had me nearly toss my headphones.  The combination of sound and visual effects make for a very harrowing journey through the dilapidated buildings.

This being a very early demo, there isn’t too much to see and do yet.  You are given a few tools to help fend off the horrors.  A flashlight is probably your most useful tool.  There is no combat in Grave, but light is used to fend off the enemies that appear in the town.  Trying to stay in the light as monsters randomly spawn around you is quite frightening.  The initial visual queue of all the light suddenly shrinking away outside generally has you scrambling for your matches, or flashlight.

Pretty sure that wasn’t here before

As someone who doesn’t generally play horror games.  Though this short demo lacks any real guidance, I found it was pretty easy to figure out what I needed to do.  Not that it made it any easier to get done mind you.  The procedurally generated maps ensure a different play through each time.  I Am almost looking forward to the full release giving me plenty of both subtle and extreme jump scares.

Grave is currently scheduled for release in Q4 of 2015, for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Don’t forget to comment and share below!

For more previews, check out Kingdom Come: Deliverance