Cubesis

Cubesis must be one of the hardest games I ever had to review. Not hard as in ‘difficult’, but it’s very difficult to explain in just a couple of sentences. But, I hope I can sum it up with just one word: balance. It’s all about balancing the world of your Cubies (the inhabitants) in order to complete the required objectives. And even though I said it isn’t difficult, it actually is. It requires patience and a clear mind. I had to retry the first level several times because I didn’t understand how to properly solve it. Yeah, the very first level. And yes, I did follow the (quite extensive) tutorial. I can hear you laughing already, but honestly I don’t mind. I had fun replaying the same level over and over again. A good sign if you ask me. As I said this game is all about balance. You’ll have to balance the weather while completing the objectives and without letting your Cubies die. Make it too hot and they’ll eventually die from dehydration and/or the heat (but only if they’re outside in the open). You also can’t create any more grain fields because the sun will have burnt it all away. But, you can move across fields that were previously under water. And if you make it too cold your people will freeze to death. You also won’t be able to grow grain because the ground is rock solid. But, they will be able to easily cross rivers (except for ships, of course). These are just a few examples, by the way; there are tons of things that can go wrong. You have to carefully find the right balance by using a mix of menhirs and churches. Also, your objectives will range from finding treasures and earning x amount of money to having x amount of an item (like grain) and having a specific number of Cubies. Failing missions is just a matter of 'when' really. It’s inevitable I think, unless you make it your life’s work to understand the game’s mechanics in and out. But replaying missions isn’t all that bad. Don’t get me wrong; it can definitely get tiresome because the results aren’t always noticeable right away. This is because the game is played in turns. It usually takes a few clicks before you (think you) see something happening and by then it might already be too late. This will sometimes feel unfair and if you don’t have enough patience you should just stay away from this game altogether. Cubesis uses pixel art for its visuals and it looks good. In a window, that is. Full screen mode makes both the text and graphics become blurry. This is because the game was made with lower resolutions in mind. I know that the developer is currently trying to manipulate the game so that it looks a bit sharper and clearer, so it might eventually look good anyway. For now it is recommended to run this in a window. The music is beautiful and fits the godlike nature of the game. It’s rather calming. Your Cubies also have little sound bites that are mostly gibberish, but the sounds they make instantly let you know what’s going on. So a ‘nu-uh’, for example, means that you can’t build there. It’s a good system for when you have to micromanage a lot later on. The game is also long. Missions can take anywhere between 15 minutes and 30 minutes, and even longer I think in some of the later levels. The campaign has 13 levels, but after that there’s apparently a second campaign with an even higher difficulty. So completing this game might take you a long, long time. It’s definitely money well spent. Cubesis is difficult to learn and difficult to master. It’s for people that like a challenge and/or have enough patience. It’s not the prettiest game out there, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s deeper than many other games I’ve seen and played. And it feels good and rewarding knowing that you managed to complete a level by juggling with the elements of nature. So, I want to recommend this to all puzzle and (turn-based) strategy gamers who like a good challenge. [quote]If you enjoyed this review please consider following me: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41144728-markdj/]curator page[/url] [/quote]

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.

В Cubesis все ужасно настолько насколько оно хорошо выглядит. А с виду перед нами без 5-ти минут шедевр, напоминающий 4х стратегии в духе цивилизации, а по словам разработчиков также логическая игра с оригинальным игровым процессом, где надо крутить погодой и рельефом для достижения целей. Вот только стратегией тут вовсе и не пахнет - нет ни оппонента, ни экономики, ни ресурсов ни развития. Все что нам надо делать это сеять чертовы поля, а сеять их можно лишь на благоприятной почве. Старые поля постоянно исчезают, а тайлы с "благоприятной" почвой вечно меняют свою дислокацию. Да конечно это вроде подчиняется определенной логике - вода испаряется, образуются тучки они несутся ветром, где прольются там и возникает удачное место под посевы, при условии что там не адское пекло или не полярный ледник. Но на деле это превращает игру в жуткий кликер, порой каждый ход приходиться засеивать по несколько полей. Просчитывать ходы и действия очень сложно не из-за глубокого геймплея, а просто потому что тут проблемы с логикой - не ясно сколько ходов осталось до потепления, не ясно что начнет таять, куда потечет вода, где возникнут поля и тд и тп. Впрочем дизайнеры уровней этого от игроков и не требуют, что конечно сказывается на качестве оных, к примеру устроить похолодание чтобы перебраться через "океан", а для этого надо запастись едой и построить нужное количество "охладителей". На деле все даже проще чем звучит, вот только кликать придеться много, ведь каждый ход потребуется сеять поля. Так что на выходе получаем логическую игру в которой не надо думать. Уровней тоже не много - оригинальная кампания в массе своей очень примитивна, а вторая компания все тоже самое только "сложнее", ну в смысле кликать дольше потребуется. Отдельно хочется отметить ужасную техническую реализацию, мало того что поддержку современных разрешений не завезли, так еще и приближение настолько ужасно насколько это можно. Представьте окно игры на 1\4 экрана, и посередине оного на половину окна увеличенная область, причем со сглаживанием м попавшими туда элементами интерфейса. Может и мелочь, но все слишком мелко и на экране с высоким DPI приходиться черезмерно напрягать зрение. А управление тут единственный враг, оно не раз станет причиной поражений, то конец хода случайно нажмете (это не сложно учитывая что он на правой кнопки мыши), то снять выделение не сможешь, то промажешь по тайлу. Единственный плюс достаточно свежий взгляд и высокая оригинальность игры, так что в ознакомительных целях купить можно, но лишь в случае если не жалко денег.

(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.

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.

This is a frustrating game to review because I feel it has a reasonable price and some of the scenarios are fun, but I ultimately don't like it and I don't think I can recommend it due to several major issues. First, the pathfinding is completely borked. You're supposed to be able to plan out 8 moves for a unit in advance. In actuality there's a very low chance that your unit will follow your orders. More often than not, it'll instead pop up a brief 'I can't go there' message that disappears almost immediately, and if you didn't notice then your unit will be staying put until you do. A lot of the scenarios are long slogs that require precision and having someone not obey their planned route will waste the whole run. This ultimately means that if you need to move more than two units at a time then it becomes a micromanagement nightmare. On the topic of messages, this game requires you to keep track of a lot of stuff, most of which can't all be on screen at one time on the busier maps. If a field dries up or a person decides they can't go someplace then you'll get a split second pop-up notifying you of it, and they all pop at the start of the turn. Blink and you'll miss them, and good luck seeing all of them without getting boned. You do not have any wiggle room on many of the later maps, so not noticing something can and often does come back to bite you. Fields drying up is also a major issue I have with this game. The weather system seems to work based on the whims of an RNG, and you'll spend most of your playtime trying to keep your fields from dying so that you can actually play the stupid game. Sometimes your fields will even dry up while it's raining on them, and sometimes the clouds simply don't want to drop rain on any of the tiles you scattered your seeds on. Having to rely on luck in a puzzle game is distracting at best, but as mentioned some of the later maps don't have any wiggle room. If you placed your field in the wrong spot at the wrong time then it's going to result in an eventual game over even though you had no control over what went wrong. You do have some limited control over the weather via magical weathervanes, but these things are even buggier than the pathfinding. It costs 50 gold (a massive amount) to change the direction of the weather, and you can accidentally misclick these things at any time. In fact, if you build one then you'd better build it well off the beaten path; any attempts to walk someone beside it will result in a change in the wind pattern (which typically has to be immediately undone at the cost of another 50 gold or you'll lose). All these things do is generate stress and give you a smidgen of control over the RNG. To say the least, I really don't like them. I also don't like how the map layout is displayed. It works great when you're playing on a flat field, but if you're trying to order someone through mountains or if you're digging a deep hole (which is required quite often) then it becomes a pain. You're supposed to be able to hide some of the terrain using a cumbersome ctrl-mouse wheel action, but the pathfinding system still allows you to plot a route on non-hidden tiles, which often overlap with lower tiles in the background. If you misclick then your unit moves to the wrong tile and you'll lose at least two turns sorting it back out, because there's no undo function. Oh, and on quite a few of the maps there's no wiggle room so this can end a scenario. Have I mentioned that this game is a bit unforgiving? My final major complaint is that it starts to lag quite heavily if you play it too long. This wouldn't be a problem if you could save and exit, but that's not an option. Since this is such a slow game with a cumbersome UI anyways, it's frustrating the have it go even slower and be even less responsive. Now on to a bit of a quibble and your results may vary, but I didn't like the actual gimmick of the game. Basically, you have to manipulate two gods: One who will dry or flood the earth, and one who will burn or freeze the earth. They're both really annoying to deal with and I found the most enjoyable scenarios were the ones that didn't make much use of them. One on one they're okay, but if you're having to juggle both of them on top of the terrible weather and pathfinding systems then it bogs down an already slow game. And that raises my final quibble: This is a slow game. Very slow. 90% of your time is hitting the space bar to skip a turn, and hoping that you notice the sudden burst of messages that can screw you over. I love slow paced turn based games, but due to the unreliable pathfinding and unpredictable farming mechanic it means that you can't just sit back and wait. Too many of the scenarios rely on you to react immediately to either the bugs or the farms, and so you have to slow down an already slow game just to make sure that you don't accidentally miss something crucial. If the game were either more forgiving or more reliable then I'd be fine with it, but as it is the whole thing is a slog. TL;DR: It has a lot of potential, but some annoying bugs combined with some annoying features and a bad UI result in a game that I just don't like. I want to, since I love turn based gaming, but this one just rubs me the wrong way at every turn. Honestly, I cut a ton nit-picky stuff out of this review, but this is ultimately a death by a thousand cuts 'negative'.

一个很奇怪的模拟经营类游戏~ 因为语言不通~所以我连教程关都过不了~ 而且人物和地图也太小了吧~ 还不给移动视角（或者我没玩到那个教程就扑街咯~）

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.

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 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.