By Isaac Smith
Before you get any ideas about the title, let me clarify that it’s referring to a game, not my towering self-esteem.
My name is Isaac Smith, but I write more often under the moniker of “Another Gamer.” I’d say, “Maybe you’ve heard of me,” but unless my mom’s reading this blog, I’m going to assume you haven’t. I’m a gamer, I’m a musician, I’m an amateur game designer, and I brew a damn good cup of coffee, making a classy replacement to our kind’s diet of Mountain Dew. As for my gaming preferences, I dig indie games, and not just in the Minecraft sense either. I play them, I love them, I study them, I make them.
But… as you can see, I’m not exactly the kind of fellow who’d be touting himself as a “god among men,” but now and then I run into a game that gives me the feeling that I am. The newest? Godus.
Godus is the modern love-child of The Sims and Age of Empires, and you can use the sims 4 laptop recommended as well. There, I’ve made two fandoms mad with one statement. With its (very) loose historical-based technology progression, its half-cartoon, half-realistic graphics and the nonsensical (and adorable) gibberish your believers utter while being thrown into the ocean or tasked with building a house… it gives you the fun, expansive feeling of Sim life with the rough-and-tough survival instinct of Age of Empires. Even the soundtrack reminds me of the two. There, I’ve defended myself.
My feelings about the game? It’s pretty. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and it’s novel. There’s a layer-based world generation system that feels a little bit like a 2nd-cousin once-removed of Minecraft, which makes you feel very god-like as you shape the land to your desires.
The balance of the game is already pretty good, as it tricks you into believing it’s a sandbox game when it really has a strict progression and learning curve, guiding you from being the modest hallucination of two hobos stranded on an island to the Magnificently Mighty Smiter of Puny Things.
That being said, there’s a lot of work to be done. It’s atypical of a Steam Greenlight game to have as much polish as Godus already does, but I see a large texture expansion as well as some additional gameplay elements being added in later in development. I’m not going to pass judgment on these types of things because I don’t see them as inherent flaws in the game’s development, but rather as items on a to-do list of fixables that the gamedevs will (hopefully) handle, given the time.
But I’m fond of it already. There’s a level of commitment that I see in the development process that says, “This is going to be good.” Attention to detail, easter eggs… a [famous classical melody] hidden so well in the game’s design that you’ll be playing for hours before you realize that you’ve been listening to it the whole time… It’s the kind of game that I’d tell my friends, “Buy it now. It’s going to get even more awesome.”
And that’s exactly my advice to you, dear reader! At 50% off on Steam right now, there’s no time like the present, either. Get cracking! Maybe we’ll fight each other once the multiplayer gets off the ground.
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Keep gaming,
~AG