Cubesis Reviews

Game attempts to be Populus more or less, but with an easier entrance point. The rate of aquiring wheat, the main resource is shown by each field, not overall, and little things missing like that add up to undermine gameplay. Using a unit to do anything kills it, with good measure cause you never seem to want population, but it makes gameplay tedious, and god games usually have some elements of tedium but this game it is the bread and butter, all micro. It would be forgivable if it was fun, but sending your minions to their doom doesn't even give you the satisfying pop noise lemmings did, nor does the game challenge you to master it's minusia. Once I got to the level that wanted me to mine through the world I found the few camera controls massively insufficent. This game just doesn't leave much satisfaction, but is happy to eat up your time without good reason. Seems like the game just needed polish to make it more smooth and enjoyable, but what currently exists is just rather bland.

The sentiment for strategies placed in plot in ancient Greece is strong. Zeus: The Master of Olympus is at the forefront of these memories, which is why the turn of building an ancient city has gained in my eyes the atmosphere. Pixelart can only help in this case.

Unlike other puz-builder games, we don't have wars here, so the plus is that I can focus only on building the city. Sometimes there is a problem with clicking on the appropriate box, the zoom is too big. In addition, the game is getting better - I recommend it.

Some of these reviews are just plain silly, specifically where his only complaint is it has a tutorial that you have to do before you can play compaign. I'll tell you right now being a few misions into the campaign, you won't undersand the details of this game had you been able to skip the tutorial. I would desribe this game as a stategy/puzzle game where you're to come up with the best plan to manage your resources and please(or displease) the gods to successfully complete an objective for each campaign mission. I briefly explain each: *Resources - Your resources basically come down to the people, grain, gold, and stone. You want to usually build a city first because these will keep your population respawning. You use your population to gain your grain and stone. This is really the KEY thing you need to understand to really understand this game, your people are a RESOURCE and sacrifice themselves for other resources. So if you need stone, you have a person dig down into stone, they die, you get stone. As long as you have a city more people with respawn so its worth to sacrifice them to plant builds and get stone(plus less the population, the less people there are to consume grain. *Gods - There are two gods. The first, you make him happy by having a higher churches built: to population ratio. When you do this and he's happy the water level will lower, when you have more people than churches the water rises. An example of when to use this is if you need to get across a sea, you make him happy, lowering the water level, allowing you to walk across the seabed. The Second god goes off of how many shrines you have built. Having more built will start to cause an ice age freezing everything other, and eliminating them warms things up. An example of using this is to freeze a body of water to walk across it to get to your objective. And that's the basics of the game! It is a really interesting and fun game when you understand this and figure out the best way to use it. It is a bit of a thinking man's game, and honestly I think that's where a some of these short gametime/short attention-spanned reviews come from. If you want to try a fun, interesting, and unique approach to a strategy/puzzle game where you may have to think some, definity give it a try. :)

Not far into the game, but I'll say this: it's extreme micromanagement. There's really no way to stop the fields from drying up, so one must add fields pretty much every other turn. I like the having to please the gods, creating balance and all that, but it can be frustrating. I'm used to city builders -- when I create it, it *stays there*. Not so with Cubesis. If you like micromanagement, I recommend this game. Otherwise look elsewhere.

FOR GOD GAME FANS ONLY! I cannot stress this enough. Though I am recommending this game, I want there to be a huge caveat. You need to really love god games to enjoy Cubesis. The mechanics are pretty interesting, balancing either having a world that's too hot or too cold with a world that's too wet or too dry, giving you situations like a flooded, iced over, or barren world, but the amount of time and micro needed for the game will probably turn off casual players. Each scenario can take 30 minutes to an hour and there are a good 10-20 of them. I...found myself kinda not wanting to play them after I got the basic mechanics down because of how much you have to manage. Also, the controls are quite clunky, which makes managing them hard. Graphics, I think, have a nice old school charm, not unlike Populous. It's what got me to buy the game and though I don't really want to keep playing it, I think it's still pretty good. Just, remember...for god game fans only.

(I played this game for dozens of hours on Desura) One of the most original and charming games I discovered in 2014. Just make sure to keep your expectations in check. Its a slower paced "puzzle" game with a god sim theme, requiring some micromanagement and is not a sim/RTS game. I found this game to be incredibly charming and the developer pulled of the theme as a puzzle game incredibly well. The individual levels are incredibly diverse and can be quite long, so this isnt a game, where you'll finish a level within 5 minutes, but its totally worth digging into. Lower the sea levels to create new paths and create your own Cubie micropopulation! Love this game.

In theory, Cubesis is a game about controlling the lives of little dudes by using godly powers of weather and terraforming. In practice, it is a lot of guess work. The explanations given in the tutorial, though summarized to a precise ratio, do not work that way in practice. Keeping churches/flowers in match with citizens can slow the gradual rise or fall of waters/temperatures, but never strike a balance. Having one more/less building can have catastrophic effects. A few dozen turns in, you will hit a difficulty curve that does not have anything to do with what the tutorial taught you. Anyone who has played the old "Sim Earth" game and experienced global warming or ice ages due to the placement of one volcano or the destruction of a single CO2 vent, will immediately understand the temperamental and self-destructive nature of this game. Any detailed explanations in the tutorial or the game world are lost in poor translation. It is my understanding that English is not the dev's native language. While that is all fine and well, it leaves me trying to guess at the finer details and mechanics of a game that mostly seems random and temperamental. Over-all, your influence and choices in the world of Cubesis lose all meaning once the mechanics are taken out of the sterile tutorial environment. Thrown together into an actual game, players will rely more on guessing or luck since the required information to make good choices is either lacking or vague at best. Couple that with controls that work when they want to, a camera that likes to only move a section of the screen at a time, and you have a game that needs more work or a very very patient player.

For an inexpensive indie game, Cubesis can bring entertainment to those who enjoy puzzle and god sim games. 6/10 The tutorial slowly takes you through all the gameplay, movement and building options. Your goals may vary, but to acheive them you must balance resources of population, food, coin and stone. Additionally, there are two gods, one who controls the sea level and one who controls the global temperature. So these factors must also be balanced or used to solve the "puzzle" of the map. Controls are simple, mostly using the mouse. LMB is used to select and move your inhabits, as well as building, and you are able to create a string of commands including building and digging. Left-clicking a town that has over 1.0 population will create an inhabitant. Each building or digging action uses up your unit. RMB ends your turn. Cubesis has interface and map elements similar to Populous and Gnomoria. The graphic style is enjoyable to me, but may not impress most. I did have trouble trying to get full screen to work, but windowed mode is fine. Zooming in seems to cause some possibly unintended graphics issues, hard to say if it is intentional or not. It doesn't get in the way of playing, however. The fun of the game is in fufilling the objective by balancing all the resources mentioned. If you want a casual game and have an extra $5, I think it is worth it.

A civ/puzzle game that could really use a slightly friendlier interface (too hard to see / click on tiny cubes sometimes, even with zoom features). If you enjoy micromanaging civ-building without combat, and I do, it's entertaining.