What if God Was One of Us: Godus

Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor

You Can Lead a Horse To Water…

Unlike many real-time strategy titles, Godus does not use resources in the traditional sense. Yes, your people need to harvest grain and mine ore, but this is more to raise their societal ranking than to use for production. In fact, at no point were my people in any danger of starving, being eaten, or even dying of old age. Godus is still in Beta, though the team claims it is 49% complete, and the sandbox feel is very prevelent. This unfortunately is a double-edged sword.

Without any real consequences for my choices, the decisions of my diety seem trivial. My people have no emotions, so I cannot gauge if they even like me as a god. Instead, I am left to invent the storyline happening inside the sporadic huts and lodges. Why do these people believe so devoutly in me as a creator? Is it because I can mold the mountains? Or because I can squash them like a bug if I so choose? If left to their own devices, my people get in no more trouble than wandering too far from camp. While they do “form friendships” (read: gather around campfires for a short “talking” animation), they never age or grow as people. I have created living creatures, but none of them have a life. 

Pathfinding is a ludicrous endeavor at times, as my population seems to be mostly blind. This is frustrating as you often require your followers to travel up steep mountain ranges to work at the Shrines of Expansion, the only way to peel back the fog of war and reveal new areas of the map (which seems like a strange restriction, considering that God should probably know everything about the world he just created). However, as the game is still in Beta, I will not harp on something that can so easily be fixed before the real launch.