Godus? More like God-awful-us

I am a big fan of big overarching civilization sims. Not just the really the strategic ones which give you control over empires, huge armies and the ability to control the entire world, but also the ones where you micromanage each individual citizen of your realm, telling them to chop down this specific tree or mine that ore. You start out with a tiny number of controllable units, which then expands into a huge city. However, the one thing that I always found missing was the fact that I was at the mercy of the elements/ the game that I always found kind of frustrating.

Therefore I have always been on the search for one of those total god sims, where you can not only control the little inhabitants of your world but the entire world itself. In fact, fuck it, I’ll just control the world and let the villagers live and die by my decisions. Thus when I saw Godus on Steam which seemingly promised everything that I wanted to see in my quest to finally become a god.

However, the two things that put me off was firstly the fact that it was on early-access. I had been badly burned before with early-access (damn you Planetary Annihilation!), so I was very reluctant to spend my hard-earned cash on a half-finished game. Secondly there was the price. Yes, ok, it may sound kind of cheap from me and £10.99 is definitely not that much. However, if you consider that we are in the age of Steam sales, low-low prices and humble bundles, you may understand why I was unwilling to pay that exorbitant amount!

Therefore it was quite fortunate for me that this game did come up on the humble bundle for a price I actually could justify paying for it. I thought, for £2.99 how bad can it be? I mean, for that price I can’t possibly be disappointed, right?

It all started out alright. I controlled two little people and had to bring them to the chosen land. On their way to doing this, I had to create landbridges for them to cross, I had to level mountains and just generally make their path passable. All quite satisfying, and I thought that as a tutorial it was all quite interesting. The graphics weren’t the best but hey, who cares about that kinda thing nowadays anyway?

Once I hit the promised land, that’s where it all started going wrong. I thought that by this point I would be able to unlock all my power and wreak havoc among my little worshippers, but no, the tutorial wasn’t over. Some of the more epic powers were still locked. The next big disappointment was the fact that there were timers on things! Who has timers in games? I had encountered this kind of mechanic in freemium games before, to entice players to spend money to speed things up. I had to wait for my citizens to build their houses, I had to wait for them to pray to me and give me their “Belief”, etc. In fact 80 percent of the game consisted of me waiting, because I couldn’t do much without Belief. Even when I got to the mission bits, which involved not waiting and actually doing something, they were all the same and I didn’t really see the point of doing them.

Even when I finally discovered the other village, nothing really interesting happened and all in all I felt incredibly cheated. It got so bad that I actually left the game running in the background and then going to watch a movie so something would actually happen. This is not what a game is supposed to be about. When you have to leave the game to really play it, the creators have gone seriously wrong somewhere.

This game was obviously made with a freemium model in mind. While you do not need to pay any extra money in the PC version to play, you can tell that this was not what was intended. In fact, I have recently found out that exactly the same game is actually a freemium game on Android and iOS. Once I knew this, I wondered how I did not suspect this before. The controls are obviously made for touchscreens, and not very comfortable on the PC environment.

What I would suggest to you, dear reader, is to get this game on mobile first. You will be able to see what I am talking about. I just wish that Game studios would stop trying to make money and actually try to create a gaming experience worth paying for, is it that hard?