Creo God Simulator Review: Running on Prayer

What is it like being a god ruling over a city? Creo God Simulator takes that question and gives you a decent answer. You take control of a group of followers as they attempt to create a new town. As their resident deity, you control the construction and growth of the town. Some citizens become followers, giving you prayers that allow you to perform miracles. Your actions and plans control how your town grows as you are the one with control in the end.

Performing miracles adds a nice twist to the city sim genre because you are in complete control. Apart from the city builder aspect, you have prayers that give you faith. That faith turns into research or even natural resources. However, the game eventually pushes you towards commerce for everything. At its core, Creo God Simulator isn’t different from a regular city sim with faith. Unless you really need another simulation game, this game may not appeal to you.

Creo God Simulator is available on PC for USD 9.99.

Every city begins with a farm and a deity.

Story – Developing a City

Creo God Simulator is all about building your own city as the resident deity. You oversee the development of the city as it starts as a village, slowly getting bigger. As time goes by, you use the citizens’ faith in you to advance their research and development. Despite being an all-powerful deity, you still have concerns and problems to deal with. Natural disasters threaten your town and the citizens request your attention regarding certain manners.

The story is similar to Weyrdlets in that there isn’t a real plotline. You have objectives to follow, some of which are necessary for your city to expand. However, you can largely go at your own pace or secure a comfortable foundation for your city first. You spend a large portion of the game turning your village into a town and expanding into a city isn’t a top priority. Making sure everyone can thrive and recover from setbacks is more important.

Resources can literally fall out of the sky and you must collect them.

It’s not a strong story but the focus isn’t on storytelling for this game. There’s no large underlying motivation for growing your town or improving the lives of your citizens. It’s just seeing how far you can take civilization while dealing with natural disasters or the progression of time. If you feel like taking your time, you can take your time. What’s more important is that you create a sustainable life for your citizens. Or burn everything to the ground because you feel like it.

Gameplay – Construction with Prayer

Creo God Simulator’s gameplay is similar to Rogue AI Simulator in terms of control and objectives. You decide how you grow your city and there are no restrictions. All you need is a place to set up houses, food, and a lumber mill to harvest wood. Eventually you can harvest stone with a quarry while gaining access to a resource market. From there, you learn how to harvest and maximise your prayer to ensure progress can continue.

Paying attention to your citizens is an important job.

A big part of the game revolves around prayer and listening to your citizens’ concerns. Some requests involve hitting certain milestones or using your powers for tasks like watering crops. Other requests involve using your powers to smite or kill off other citizens to prove your existence. Addressing these concerns gives you resources and additional prayer necessary to continue your miracles.

On one hand, addressing your citizens’ concerns adds a layer of immersion to city building. These aren’t random NPCs who are there to make the streets look lively. Your citizens have beliefs, needs, and wants just like everyone else. Those requests are a way to ensure everyone knows that you are reliable and are looking out for people. Even when you smite a citizen by request, it’s the deity showing that they do listen to requests.

Smiting a villager seems bad but it gets you more prayers.

On the other hand, the prayer system forces you to listen to every request. Prayer is a resource in short supply during the early game as well as citizen numbers. If you feel uncomfortable taking requests, your progress stalls for a long time. The request system is also not intuitive because you aren’t told there’s a quest menu. This means requests can pile up but you miss out on them. It’s an example of a gameplay mechanic the game didn’t think through.

Foresight – Lacking in Perspective

As a regular city builder sim, Creo God Simulator is a decent effort. It carries the same mechanics as other titles in the genre. The prayer system is a point of difference but it only sounds good on paper. When actually executed, the prayer system only covers a limited amount of requests. Refusing them isn’t a feasible option unless you enjoy extremely slow gameplay. This also ruins the game’s entire point of “choosing what god you want to be”.

Sometimes resources can’t be obtained and there’s nothing you can do.

While choosing between good and bad decisions always has a cost-benefit analysis, it barely exists here. There’s almost no reason to not grant a prayer even if it involves smiting citizens. If you don’t, there’s no progress. Citizens might not react too much to a smiting, but it certainly feels like you have no choice as a deity.

Something similar is also found in the game’s commerce trading system. Once you gain access to the resource market, it ends up being the most efficient way to harvest resources. While that isn’t inherently bad, a good chunk of deity powers are built on restoring natural resources. If you don’t need to restore resources, those powers are useless. Your harvesting output will never keep up with purchases and removes the incentive to keep harvesting resources.

There’s a lot of research that will be released in future updates.

The game does have more offerings but some of them haven’t been created yet. It feels like the game has ideas that sound good but doesn’t fully execute them. Not everything is going to be perfect of course, but these aspects could be thought out more. But if the future additions don’t pan out gameplay-wise, this could reduce the game’s ability to stand out.

Audio & Visual – Typical City Sim

The visuals consist of several blocks put together and they bring a small touch of realism to the environment. Your citizens have the same block look but are smaller in comparison. You must zoom in to spot them and you can’t tell individual details apart. Fortunately, you can use Inspection Mode to view various details about citizens. Most importantly, you find out if they are followers or not which helps for smiting.

The audio is nothing to write home about as it is just simple background music. There are some notable sounds like earthquake rumbling but it’s mostly sound effects. Should citizens come to harm, there will be some gasps or screams. But you can listen to the background music or use your own sounds without any noticeable impact on gameplay.

Creo God Simulator was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by the publisher from Vicarious PR.