Pocket Universe : Create Your Community – PC (P)review

Genre: Action-adventure simulation
Developer: Core Steel Game Studio
Publisher: Core Steel Game Studio
Release Date: Oct 13th, 2017
Edited by AlexKnight2005

Pocket Universe: Create Your Community is an open-world, base-building, RPG-like thing set sometime after some massive war that reduced Humanity to what appears to be a mostly agrarian lifestyle. The world we’re given is vast and mostly empty, except for several settlements (that are way better than yours) and the odd bandit or six. You are Commander, complete with satellite camo, apparently, the seventh person for your settlement (which used to be a farm), knocked out three days before the game starts. From there, you need to husband your meager resources in such a way that you can generate more (how is an open question) to build, to build, trade, and conquer your way across a massive map: Some ten thousand square kilometers and another four thousand on an island somewhere. Not that I went looking for it, mind.

 

From here, it’s janky graphics, shiny ground cover at night, borked animations (seriously, there was one attempt at a run that had the poor guy floating across the terrain in the “bow drawn” position). Terrain and objects to walk through, and so on. Normally by now, I’d be waxing lyrical about the story, some of the gameplay, world building, and whatnot: But not today, because the game doesn’t have any of these things. There’s a nice soundtrack, sure, but it seems to have come out of an asset pack I’ve probably got on one of my many hard drives. Sound effects are rare, and they don’t seem to mesh with anything else that might be going on. People park their butts to the left of their chairs, and the list goes on.

 

Honestly, that’s mostly minor stuff. The UI is physically painful, and it takes too long to get from one point to another, there’s no toggle setting for sprint, so you’re going to spend half an hour holding down the Left Shift key and W to move down the road to the next village. Just to add insult to injury, there’s no controller support to speak of, so that method for saving your hands for more important things is right out.

This game, if you can call it that, likes to crash while trying to start, then again on load, and should you have the good (?) fortune to get into the game, all you get is a series of prompts on the right-hand side, with no clue as to what your goal is. You initially have three people of use to you—the “General,” The “Engineer,”, and the “Manager,” all of whom you can have a very limited (and mostly unchanging) dialogue with. The dialogue “tree,” if one is being charitable, is butted up against the bottom of the window, and the one bit that does change is usually half-obscured by the lower frame of the window—this is the first (and hopefully only) time I can honestly say that running a game in full-screen mode has ever been the preferred way to play. Moving the mouse to make a choice will affect the camera as well.

The combat in Pocket Universe is not great, to say the least. You have a sword and shield to use in self-defense of yourself and the world population though I often found myself letting the population handle most of these fights during my time with the game, as they more than often had it handled, and if my involvement was needed, id do so wearily out of how buggy it was. These actions are also mapped to your 1 and 2 keys, not the most logical nor comfortable of keys to use for combat actions.

Where do I begin with Pocket Universes issues? Let’s start with a lack of walls for your town and barracks. This caught me off-guard and only escalated issues with the combat, making it more frequent than needed. Follow up this with NPCs not pulling their weight in this “new world” you have made for them. Many a time I had to go and send my town chief to handle simple delivery tasks when I had one or two perfectly viable NPCs that could have done the same task if a system allowed for this. Add in a situation where some NPCs would have 1 name on their nameplate and then a completely different name when you engaged in speech with them and you are left with one of the more buggy and annoying experiences (for me) on the platform.

Regardless of this game’s poor state, I can easily not recommend this title for the many reasons stated above.