Creo God Simulator - Promising but Flawed God Game

• DEVELOPER: MKSM Design LLC
• PUBLISHER: MKSM Design LLC
• PLATFORMS: PC
• GENRE: City-builder / Simulator
• RELEASE DATE: January 23, 2025
• STARTING PRICE: 9,75 €
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

Creo God Simulator is a city-building, resource management, and survival game where you play as the Creostrider, a divine being tasked with building a thriving society while proving yourself as the one true god. The game combines elements of classic god games like Populous with modern mechanics, offering a mix of creativity, strategy, and divine intervention. While the premise is exciting and the foundations are solid, the game suffers from slow pacing, clunky controls, and a lack of polish that holds it back from reaching its full potential.

The core gameplay of Creo God Simulator revolves around building a civilization, managing resources, and using godly powers to influence your followers. You start with a small group of villagers and gradually expand your town by constructing buildings, unlocking technologies, and responding to random events. The game features a faith/fear system, where your actions, whether benevolent or tyrannical, affect how your followers perceive you.

But my biggest issue with this game is that to use these actions, you need willpower, which fills up painfully slowly, especially in the early stages, making it frustratingly annoying. Creo God Simulator feels like a game you should play while multitasking, as everything in it moves at an slow pace. God powers, such as summoning meteors or controlling the weather, are fun to use but feel limited in scope due to the scarce resources you receive. This limitation makes it difficult to interact meaningfully with your followers, which undermines the core fantasy of being a god.

Surprisingly good building system, but slow pace and tedious micromanagement

The building system is this game is surprisingly good. You can place structures freely, allowing for creative town layouts. Whether you want a tightly packed urban center or a sprawling village, the choice is yours. The inspiration system (tech tree) lets you unlock advanced buildings and decorations, giving you more tools to shape your society. However, as mentioned before, the pacing of resource generation is painfully slow too. Even basic buildings like lumberjacks require large amounts of resources, and with resources trickling in at a snail’s pace, the game often feels like a waiting simulator rather than a god game.

But once you get things running, all the buildings start to make sense and, when combined, produce a decent amount of resources like stone, wood, and food. However, there’s another aspect that undermines the game: the population system. Your population is divided into different age groups, children, adults, and elderly people, and since only adults are capable of working, you’ll constantly need to build new houses to attract more families. This becomes annoying over time because losing adults directly impacts your workforce, and since everything in the game requires manual input, such as assigning workers to buildings or removing them, it adds an extra layer of micromanagement that can feel tedious.

Followers are the ones who influence how much willpower you gain, but I still find this mechanic to be quite buggy. For some reason, the number of followers fluctuates constantly, sometimes dropping as low as 5 and other times jumping up to 50. It’s inconsistent, and I’m still trying to figure out how it actually works. There’s also no clear explanation of who these followers are or why their numbers change so drastically. In the end, this mechanic didn’t significantly impact the overall gameplay, but it was an annoying and poorly implemented feature.

Good idea, but poor execution – Creo God Simulator needs serious improvements

The game’s procedural events and quests add variety, but they can become repetitive over time. Disasters like earthquakes or locust swarms are intriguing at first, but the lack of depth in how you respond to them makes them feel more like annoyances than meaningful challenges. The archaeology system, which allows you to collect artifacts and uncover lore, is a nice addition but doesn’t significantly enhance the gameplay.

Some events are particularly frustrating, such as cats suddenly occupying your food resources and causing your population to go hungry. Instead of dealing with them in a straightforward way, you’re forced to spend willpower to shoo them away. The problem is, you often have no willpower to spare, leaving you helpless to resolve the situation. In many cases, restarting feels like the only viable option.

Visually, Creo God Simulator boasts a charming art style that perfectly suits its whimsical, godly theme. The buildings and environments are vibrant, colorful, and richly detailed. However, the camera controls are clunky and sluggish, making it frustrating to navigate your growing town smoothly. This becomes a significant drawback as your civilization expands. I never managed to fully populate the map because everything progresses at such a slow pace.

Ending thoughts

In all honesty, Creo God Simulator has the potential to be a great god simulator game, but as it stands, it feels very rough around the edges. Unfortunately, there’s not much fun to be had in its current state. The game desperately needs adjustments, particularly in the amount of resources provided and the pacing of progression. Even the option to speed up time doesn’t help much, it just turns into more waiting and frustration. However, if the developers address these issues, Creo God Simulator could evolve into a truly polished experience.

Review copy provided by the publisher

2.2