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Review

Duration: 21:45

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I'm playing Cubesis, a turn-based god game by Jan Horacek and Jindrich Pavlasek. The game has a ten-level tutorial plus over twenty additional puzzles; however, you must complete each level in order (including the tutorials) to progress in the game, effectively locking out content if you can't successfully beat each level. Each level has several objectives to meet, usually collecting hard-to-reach treasure chests with usually some minimal level of resource collection. While most levels don't have a specific path to the solution, it can be difficult deciphering what the developers had in mind. The interface makes it difficult to see around buildings and other objects, which creates a problem when the map becomes crowded and uneven. Citizens can be spawned at cities and moved elsewhere to construct a variety of objects: fields to make grain, cities to make gold and more citizens, churches to stop the rising seas, granaries to store grain, menhirs to stop global warming, weathervanes to change wind and water directions, plugs to halt rising seas, and altering the landscape up or down to mine stone or reach inaccessible areas. Balancing resources requires constant, careful attention, as ignoring one aspect of the game will quickly lead to defeat. While there are some good ideas in Cubesis, the inelegant interface and finicky difficulty makes this god game somewhat inapproachable.