Godus is a fun simulation game. For a free download, it gives you a lot of value and is a very deep experience. Its slow pace and premium add-ons might turn some people off, but it is still a very solid title.
The game does the hard work of hooking you in, but is insistent on pushing you away straight after unless you cough up cash, which feels both insulting and desperate.
Please only read the comments of the critics this game is not as bad as everybody else seems to make it out to be it does not deserve a zero or 3 frankly this is a good idea with standard pay to play ideas and the whole you have to wait a long time is a legitimate complaints but despite that it's far more enjoyable than most people make it out to be the graphics while simply passable can actually be interesting once you start to play the game more and more the game has an unlimited playing mechanic if AND ONLY IF you are incredibly skilled The time takes for you to actually be able to do something new and to keep playing is actually very small something a lot of people have neglected to mention (it takes literally 30 seconds before you can actually do something small and minor but it's better to just wait it out of whole day) The gameplay can be a bit hard to control and this can screw you over in some of the quote unquote puzzle sections and while that was an extremely annoying experience that I had it hasn't exactly ruined the entire game for me yes you have to wait a lot and yes the design simplistic and yes the gameplay is simplistic but even still there is quite a bit to enjoy and go through the game to your own pace and the fact that it's a fee to play game means that it's also something you can quit very easily it's a game where you can stop at any point in time without feeling really guilty that you haven't visited your followers for and such and such time or you haven't gone through some of the puzzle sections in a long time there isn't really a daily login bonus yet or at least as far as I have gotten now for the people backed up the game this can actually be a very very very annoying game to go through as you do you have to wait and you do have to take a long time with this and it is available for mobile platforms which will probably get the biggest chunk of attention But dang it this is a review for the iOS version and you should take that as a positive note you will find The occasional ai walking bug that can really screw you over and while that does provide a giant piece of frustration you can overlook that so long as you can find a way around it here's the thing though most of the time you can't for one simple reason the camera doesn't turn out around and you're always going to be looking things through one way now you can zoom in and you can zoom out but you can't turn the camera around the game uses this design a very frustrating way at some point and there is requirement to turn the camera I'm not kidding this is what you will say dear readers and dear devs I want fixed immediately I know you're not going to do that because you've taken the lazy route to making this game but still major issue please fix it also for the love of God take out some of the mechanics all they do is just increase the loading times seriously that's not what we want to do we want to feel like we're making progress rather than just increasing the loading time we are investing in some upgrade because we are in fact building big your houses or doing different things make us feel like we can be rewarded for our actions because we actually invested in something that we would want rather than invest In something because the game did not have enough loading times I imagine this will get more and more frustrating but I want updates to help this issue rather than updates that make it worse now putting that aside you could've done a better job with audio you could have done a better job with the graphics let's not kid ourselves here it would've also been nice if you actually randomized the map so that online players can play with each other (curiosity was popular because of that) I know it could be a lot to implement but maybe as a future update or a completely separate game that is paid now I understand this my 10 is not a 10 this game deserves a max score of 5 but it's better than 1.5/10 (seriously guys) now I expect to edit this review heavily but I also expect to be vastly disappointed for future updates if you can surprise me great but you have lost plenty of interest in my eyes and I'm sure in everyone else's
P.S.
Thanks everyone for reading my grammatically flawed review (Siri will do that) and I'm only giving this a ten from other reader reviews when I was writing this it was a 1.5 so I hope this didn't trick you into thinking this was acceptable
Aesthetically a very satisfying game. I got quite addicted for a while - enjoyed uncovering stuff and building communities. I think sometimes people are just looking for the wrong things in a game like this - just chillax into it I say.
So two weeks into my Godus adventure I took stock of what I was doing and realised it was nothing more than checking into the game a couple of times a day to click on various things and collect my resources with a view to having enough currency - termed Belief - to knock down a mountain that was in my way. It turns out God can move mountains, but man is it expensive.
Godus gets off to a promising start that sadly falls flat after awhile leaving you not much to do, and not much incentive to keep coming back to the ever increasing wait times.
This is a game by Peter Molyneux who, for all his misfires in recent years, remains a guy who is fiercely intelligent and deeply committed to creative game development. The fact that he allowed this game to fall into such a cynical monetisation model shows just how enslaved developers and publishers have become to free-to-play games, and that makes Godus a symbol, but for reasons that Molyneux probably didn't anticipate; it's a symbol for just how infuriating free-to-play has become.
i) hit paywall
ii) go to settings
iii) go to date and time
iv) turn off "set automatically"
v) scroll forward N hours / days.
Et voila.
This is a very enjoyable, rendered more enjoyable by the complete avoidability of the paywall. I'm now running out of enjoyment, but I've had a good >25hrs of play, far more than I get out of most iOS titles.
I've now hit the point where there's nowt left to explore, and not much to do bar harvest resources to sculpt more plateaux to build more b*stard huge resource producers. Which is fine, like. But begins to get a bit samey.
Controls, as others detail in greater depth, are also a bit wonky.
To be honest I spent some hours of fun with this game. I think the concept wasn't bad.
On the other hand, this has been probably one of the buggiest games I have ever played. There were all kinds of issues...
Also, I can't forgive the fact that the game is totally unfinished, and they still make the players pay for the stupid gems.
Mediocre at best. Pay to play (not even pay to win) or wait around for hours at a time. Not in the same league as Dungeon Keeper, but not exactly worth spending much time on. Download it, play for a bit, then delete it - thats what I did.
Godus makes me sad. It makes me sad because it wasnt forced to be, what it is. The project itself was kickstartet and the pc version was sold via Steam Early Access. Enough money flow to free the developers from being forced to implement timers, an overpriced shop or obfuscated rating popups. Godus did it anyway. Did Molyneux do it because if greed? I don't think so. Instead, i think he did it because he really thinks this is was people want. Being able to buy progress, wait for timers and less gameplay and context over all. And this, ladies and gentlemen, makes me very, very sad.
Godus unfortunately falls into the category of games with so much potential, but forfeit that on bad business model choices. First, the good news. Godus is a true god-game, where you, the player, have the power to reshape the world (well, bit by bit), and your followers look to you for guidance and help. If you enjoy nurturing little followers and making their little lives better, then the game design of Godus is tailor-made for you. Graphics are weak but passable (barely), sound is nothing noteworthy. However, the bad elements of the game totally wreck it, and I mean thoroughly. First of all, the developers make no mention of it, but you need to be online at all times. Why? It's not an MMO game, so why the online requirement? Because you need to use 22cans' ridiculous social service to continue play once the tutorial is over. This is an arbitrary decision that takes what could be a very pleasant commuter or lunch break game and turns it into something unplayable. Even laying that aside, Godus is beset with some serious faults, not the least of which is a highly erratic control scheme. Rather than the finger-paint controls that are the most common for sweeping adjustments to the game world, Godus uses a radial model that sets the initial touch as a focal point and the subsequent drags as action. The result is a highly unreliable control design that often undoes work just completed because the game decided that's what you were trying to do. Finally, while graphics are "passable," that should not be construed as "good." The graphics of Godus are reminiscent of a childish version of Kingdom of Keflings: very cartoonish and extremely primitive. Overall, it's a game with an outstanding concept, but crippled by poor execution, bad decisions by the distributor (and the inexplicable agreement of gamemaking titan Peter Molyneux with those decisions), and a lack of polish take what could've been the Next Big Thing and make it Yet Another Example of Game Developers Caring Only About Secondary Income. Such a total disappointment.