Universe Sandbox Review

 

Universe Sandbox 2 - Steam Game Review

Not too long ago, I decided to buy a space engine game called, 'Universe Sandbox 2'. I've decided to buy the game after watching 'GraystillPlays' play the game, countless number of times and in the newest video where he added rings on Earth, pushed me to buy the game for £12.49 on steam. After that, I downloaded the game - surprisingly, it's a pretty small game for how much you can do inside the game - and just in a few minutes it had finished, it's about 2GB in size so it didn't take much storage. Then I launched up the game...

The first time when I loaded up the game, a tutorial about the game showed up. It was very useful, it showed me where to use the tools that GraystillPlays had used and also workshop maps that you could use to replicate different things up to the creators of those who made it. You could also theoretically make one by just creating a map inside an empty world and post it onto the Universe Sandbox Workshop on steam for other users to use. I decided to use the one that the game had told me to use after I had finished the tutorial, the Solar System.

Since it was the Solar System, I of course had to do something to the Earth first, like blow it up, increase it in size, add more moons to it, crash it into the moon or another planet, you get it. You can do so many things in the game though soon enough, it does become a bit repetitive but that just means that you haven't figured it all yet. I decided to make the Sun to into a massive Black Hole that sort of engulfed the whole Solar System itself, which didn't go well... Then after that I played around in sandbox mode where it's a plain, world full of nothingness, that you can do anything to it. Spawn whatever you want, replicate anything you want, collide anything you want, there's just a whole lot of things to do in the game basically.

So that's what I've currently done in the game as I've only gotten in 2 days ago and now I'll be rating the game on several factors on.

• How does the game look - the graphics
• The Gameplay / Game time - what you can do in the game
• Can you play Multiplayer?
• Sound Fx - how realistic the sounds are in the game
• Audience - is the game really fit for you?
• PC Requirements - can you play this game on a regular laptop?
• Game Size - Is the game too big for my storage drive?
• Learning the Controls - how hard it is to learn the mechanics in the game
• Is it worth it's price?

    Then for the finale, I'll be giving my final review and rating on the game.

Game Looks

The game looks like a space exploration game that you can venture into space, but rather you're the one controlling space. There are stars in the game, moons, asteroids, galaxies that look good and when you upscale certain planets or stars, they do change in colours as you tune their stuff, so that's a bonus as this creates different looks for different planets and stars.

The game looks good, although if you look into real depths in the texture, this is not some 4k type of texture / images like some games have. But from a distance, the game doesn't look that bad and looks pretty smooth. We still have to give them credit for the detail they put in all their different stuff inside of the tools section that you can use to spawn, destroyed, add stuff and more. 

Gameplay

The gameplay of the game is pretty good, especially with the variety of tools they give you to play around with. Like I said, the tools can be used to through objects at planets. You can change the speed - or velocity if you're more scientific -, the temperature, and the size. If you're too lazy to wait for something to happen, you can speed up the game by just holding down on the forward button to make time faster so you get wait less, although you may miss out on stuff that happened during that time you skipped super quick.

On top of the variety of tools, there's tons of objects that you can use your tools on. There are small props, like footballs, basketballs, asteroid, planets, moons, suns, galaxies, black holes, the list goes on till the end. These are fun to play with although I must say, when you play with galaxies and black holes, it kind of becomes boring as there's a big barrier on what you can do with them - as there's really not much to do with them, you also have to speed up the game by alot. But besides that, it's pretty fun messing around with the space.

Multiplayer

No, the developers themselves have already noted that this would be an incredible addition to the game, especially in VR, although they haven't coded the game for it to be compatible for people to play together. They only coded the game for it to work for singleplayer; meaning that they would have to rescript the whole game itself for them to add multiplayer, and plus most people said see this addition as a useless add as most people already play singleplayer with all the ideas in their mind.

The benefits of multiplayer can be that people can play together and challenge each other. For example, a person could be throwing stuff at a planet, while the other tries to deflect it by changing earth's surround to deflect it. This would be more immersive in VR, so they actually seem like they are deflecting the objects from earth. This can also help people imagination by combining their imagination with their friends, making every new idea original and fun - they can also experience this together. This seems like a small addition, but it can lead to massive benefits unless people don't see the benefits in it.

Sound Effects

The sound effects are good, there's also music in the background which can get a bit annoying, but I'm pretty sure you can turn this on and off in the settings of the game and increase the game audio to make it louder and noticeable. Besides that, there's not really much to put in this paragraph tab.

Audience

The audience for this game sort of ranges from what you're looking for. If you are looking for a space game that you can experiment, then go ahead, this game is just for you. Although, if you're looking for a game that you can explore space, this is not the correct one. There are a few other games in steam that you can play to explore the whole universe by teleporting to certain REAL discovered planets by scientists. I've forgotten the name of the game but I'm pretty sure you can find it from a youtubers video on youtube. Pretty sure it's called like space engine or something.

For the age rating, this game is probably made for 10+. The age rating may seem kind of young but maybe it's better for kids to start young in subjects they find fascinating and exciting. This can make them more interested into the subject and learn more about them. I'm personally 13 years old and I find this game fun to play around with. Sometimes it's not all about learning about space and science, getting to learn about it and finding it more interesting. Sometimes it's about just having fun and messing around with space and science itself.

PC Requirements

The game shows the minimum requirements and the recommended requirements in the description of the game. So, if you just scrolled down to the bottom area of the steam page, you should find it. The game isn't really that graphicly detailed, although when you speed up time alot, the game starts to get very laggy as the PC has to render each pixel and particle at a very rapid speed that you have setted it at. 

MINIMUM:

• OS *: Windows 7 SP1+ (64-bit)*
  
• Processor: 1.6 GHz dual-core
  
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
  
• Graphics: 2 GB Video Memory†, Shader Model 5.0
  
• DirectX: Version 11
  
• Storage: 2 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:

• Processor: 3.6 GHz quad-core
  
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
  
• Graphics: 4 GB Video Memory
  
• DirectX: Version 11
  
• Additional Notes: For VR, see recommendations from your headset manufacturer

Those are the minimum and recommended specification by the game itself in the description. I don't think you're going to have a bad time trying to run this game, although it may get a bit laggy if you start to spawn alot of things, for example, huge rings with tons of rocks, orbiting a planet at a constant / fast velocity / speed. It shouldn't be horrible if you're just experimenting that I usually do. 

Extra note - colliding massive planets together may cause a bit of lag due to the debris the planets create due to the collision.

Game Size

I'm pretty sure I've already said this before in the starting page, but I said that I was surprised that the game was so little in storage usage. This was because the game had a ton of variation of items, objects, stars, planets, moons to use in the game, yet it used up so little storage. You'll definitely won't have any problems with downloading this game and having to worry about storage usage as the game is only about 2GB is size, just like what it says in the PC recommended specs right above this paragraph.

Learning

Learning the controls to the game is fairly easy, especially with the in game-built tutorial that I've also already mentioned in the starting. When you load up the game, the game firstly greets you with all the basics of the game. The basics are easy as all you have to do is just click a few buttons to activate it and use it, although the buttons that are sort of hard to use are the ones that are hard to understand. Some of the tools use a weird measuring thing that they use to change the tool intensity. To simplify it, the basic tools are easy to use as they are simple to use, while the harder tools are the ones that are hard to understand that are sort of hard to set up or use. Like how most people explain this, it's easy to learn, yet hard to master.

Is it worth it?

IS THE GAME WORTH IT'S PRICE? I would say so, especially if you're looking for a game just like this one. If you weren't look for a game like this and you bought it anyways, you will probably say it wasn't worth it and you should have bought a different game. The creator of the game is a mediocre sized team. The game itself should be getting alot more updates, although there really isn't much to add except for stuff to fix, like make the physics more realistic. Unless you are looking for a game to update frequently, this game isn't it as the developers are sort of sloppy on finding new things to add to the game, especially if it doesn't add much extra value to the game for so much effort they put into it.

My final response to the game is that it's good. I like the game. I'll give the game a solid 7.5/10 as some of the gravity stuff on the black hole doesn't really make sense, like when the blackhole sucks up a galaxy or a star, it doesn't add an accretion disk to the black hole. Also, when a black hole sucks up something, it just flings it instead of absorbing it. Ok that's my review, bye.