WorldBox: God Simulator Review (tr0n42)
TL:DR It's worth the money now.
Have you ever played a game and just been overwhelmed by the possibilities within that have yet to be realized? Worldbox, for me, was one of those games. Operative word is "was". I'd have called this game "GOAT God Game Potential: The Game" before the recent beta update. In fact, I removed it from my wishlist (I played mobile for a long time) assuming the game was dead. My heart just couldn't take it waiting so very long for something to be done with the game. I didn't buy it... There wasn't 20 dollars worth of material in the game to buy it on top of the mobile version.
Boy was I mistaken. Worldbox is the No Man's Sky of god games. It never was bad, though. It was just frustrating to see what the game could be versus what it was. Little did I know that they'd layer on a whole new game on top of the sim they built. Before, I was overwhelmed with disappointment that there wasn't more meat on the bone, but now I'm overwhelmed with the sheer number of additions and features.
For the uninitiated, Worldbox, is a god game sandbox in the vein of old Bullfrog games like Populous, letting you interact with the world in any way you want and to any degree. It's for kids who liked watching ant farms and enjoy emergent stories and situations. It even comes complete with a series of challenges hidden inside the achievement system, where you can unlock and control a series of powerful aspects by which to modify both the world and its inhabitants. It's a game where you can just watch things happen or you can meddle with the world's population all the way down to neuron activation and genetics.
The part that blew me away was that all of this chemistry set is there to give you options. For example, I found a race of candy creatures in a special biome that were just milling about. I bestowed a prefrontal cortex and an advanced hippocampus and now those candy creatures established a colony in their candy land, somehow got the "evil" trait, and threatened to take over my world. The last alliance of elves and humans held them off but I had to interfere with a well-placed volcano, to keep King Candy with his full set of legendary armor and a flame sword from wiping out the elves with his counterattack.
Stuff like this is commonplace in this game and the butterfly effect is very real. Had I not messed around with the natural order, King Candy would have never risen to power and laid waste to most of my world.
In short, 10/10... best god game ever without the Peter Molyneux bravado and over-promising. Well done.
Now turn this game into a live desktop so I can just run it in the background all the time without switching windows.