Recent reviews by Paws Pawzouti

Ahhhhh, there’s gnome place like home, there's gnome place like home, there's gnome place like home...! *swept away by tornado* :D

Not the usual gnome-spects! If you've ever wanted to don a blue frock, a red peak cap, curly shoes, and sprout an epic beard, then go raid suburban America to endlessly torment a 70-something bachelor, this is your game, and gnomebody does it better! Arriving by tornado from the flying Gnome Island, you're tasked with 15-minute-long missions to crash "Gramps" house with only your friends and Johnathan (your very music-minded fairweather gnomefriend) and *deep breath* steal everything not nailed down in order to generate materials for crafting furniture for Gnome Island and handy tools for your gnomes, cause chaos, get stung by bees, yeeted out windows, flushed down toilets, baked in microwaves, toss grenades, worship the almighty Atari 2600, drag your friends into a campfire, get punched by sloths, kidnapped by butt goblins (I don't really know what they are but it's accurate, you'll see) and a thousand other stupidly hilarious things! beyond just stealing, you also have 5 specific orders to do such as "steal 4 things from the kitchen", "Put 3 objects into a blender", "break 5 windows", "make a gnome slip on a bar of soap", or "make Johnathan drop his boom box" as examples. You need to complete at least three per round in order to advance, and the world gets harder with each day. Your special ability is basically extendable arms that you use to manipulate the world along with various tools and upgrades to make burglin' life easier, which includes often freeing your friends from captivity. This game will teach you who your friends are.

Just remember, if you're caught by Gramps, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court... of /lawn/.

If I had any wishes I'd say... cosmetics! Even just color, I'd like to be something OTHER than 'blue frock, red hat' sometimes!

Seriously, I want to five this game more than one thumbs up. If have two thumb, why not two thumb up?

It can be pretty toxic playing with randoms but get a group of people that want to play with you together and it can be a blast. And it's rather potato-friendly too. :)

It's not -overly- difficult but also not quite too grindy that it's unpleasant, though it may get grindy if you love to minmax the gene system - and that's not 100% a requirement.

Well, it's better then ARK so far! I'll update this as I progress.

While I certainly do enjoy this game and do recommend it, it can be truly a tough game to really enjoy and it causes a few caveats, and there's... 'reasons', like others have said.

For one, the UI is a bit lacking in some essential functions that confused me, like for example "I just finished researching some newer trucks, so now how do I upgrade my old trucks to these without buying new trucks, selling the old trucks, and making the whole route over again? Well, I tried sending the trucks to the depot and then selecting 'Replace' but it only lets me replace with the same type of vehicle." Huh? Does everything have to go the long way around?

Please please, give us the ability to designate one way roads - at *least* for our vehicles... or maybe allow us to set preferences at intersections for weighted directional choices (like "always turn right here if the road ahead is blocked", basically a 'roads version' of railroad signals)

This and the game has no concept currently of RCI; You end up with strange towns that have sports stadiums built right beside your giant smoke-spewing factories and a chaotic loose combination of commercial, industrial, and urban houses all sort of mishmashed together.

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. :)

Really, if you don't have an actual VR headset, it is like Second Life with a more toxic community. You're far too limited in what you can do to express yourself (essentially up to 8 emotes, versus whatever you can stuff into an animation override in SL). Community is full of trolls in everywhere public, and private communites tend to be either very inclusive or elitist. :P

A great improvement on a classic. Multiplayer is nice, but I wish the tethering would be a little less strict. :(

It's like Minecraft meets Foundation-like city builder. I was not aware that the game had multiplayer until just recently and that's what cinched it for me. Been trying to find something like this for ages.

Is it ironic and odd to say I wish I had remembered I had this little gem in my possession before I blew cash on Anno 1800? KnC is a wonderful little game that does not hands-down require you to make everything in a perfect, specific layout in order to have a chance at success later on. The fact that you can be somewhat organic in layout in KnC is all it takes to make this a more worthy investment, IMHO... :P