The only thing limiting you in this game is your own creativity, so let your imagination run wild and you’ll keep coming back to Universe Sandbox time and time again! The Bottom Line
With so many variable parameters, you can explore the power of gravity and other fundamental forces for hours. There’s so much to do in Universe Sandbox, so it’ll take a while before you get bored with the game. The controls in Universe Sandbox are precise and fluid, allowing you to manage, develop, and destroy your creations effortlessly. Of course, you do need a compatible headset and controllers to use the VR mode, but playing with just a mouse and a keyboard is fine, too. Since the game can also be played in VR, you get two types of controls. The lack of story means that you’ll have to take matters into your own hands after the initial tutorial, but you can start out with some fan-submitted universes and slowly work your way up towards designing your own. You can even toss out different kinds of balls and dice into space to see how they’d interact with each other. Otherwise, your whole creation is going to be destroyed by the relentless force that’s holding it all together.Īs you experiment with different objects, you’ll learn about the fundamental laws of gravity and get better at designing your creations so that they don’t get squished together or end up floating away from each other. Universe Sandbox gives you a blank canvas and you can paint it however you wish, but remember to obey the laws of gravity. You don’t have to survive, become the best, or oversee the development of a civilization. There is no story to go through in Universe Sandbox, and there are no bosses to beat. What’s more, the visuals in Universe Sandbox are not only a pleasure to look at, but also incredibly realistic, featuring planets and other astronomical bodies that were modeled after real-life objects. You can enjoy the beautiful backgrounds and add your own planets to them, creating new solar systems and bringing your own unique vision of outer space to life. Unlike the latter, however, here you can actually work together with other people and explore the randomly-generated universe with them.Being a space simulator, Universe Sandbox has to have good graphics, and fortunately, the game is amazing in this respect. All the makings of a neat sandbox gameĪll things considered, Cube Universe innovates in terms of world scale, much like No Man’s Sky did a few years ago. In terms of graphics, the blocky landscapes are pretty nice, but it’s worth noting that the current early access version might come with low framerates, even if your machine is up to modern standards. This should make it much easier to undertake large-scale projects, as well as meet new people along the way. One of the more unusual features provided with Cube Universe is the fact that you can also meet up with other players in the multiplayer mode. As mentioned before, you can also undertake randomly-generated quests from NPCs, although there is no solid storyline in place as of yet. You can use the blocks to build structures, as well as craft items. The gameplay itself is quite similar to what you may be used to from classics like Minecraft, which means that you walk around collecting various types of blocks by destroying the environment. Level-up your character and gather better items The spaceship itself is customizable and drivable, although at this point you can only use the autopilot to travel between solar systems. By using the teleportation feature, you can beam out anywhere on the planet, and you can also do that at any point while you are on the ground, making exploration a lot easier. You start on board of your spaceship, hovering above a nondescript planet. On top of all this, the quests on said planets are randomly created as well, which should technically allow you to keep playing forever. Not only that, but every planet and moon you come across is procedurally-generated, so you are never going to see the same thing twice. A voxel-based RPG with entire planets to explore and exploit for resourcesĬube Universe is not your average sandbox game, mainly because it allows players the liberty to take off from one planet and go to another if they are not happy with the layout. In fact, procedurally-generated worlds are highly desirable, since they provide gamers with great replay value and the incentive to explore. Single-player games can’t even get away with a simple storyline anymore, because everyone expects an open world and the possibility to affect the course of the story along the way, especially when it comes to RPGs. The promise of great graphics and smooth gameplay mechanics is not enough in today’s video game industry, mainly because people already expect this from developers.