Review: My Little Universe

My Little Universe was received for free for review purposes

My Little Universe plays like a mobile game ported to PC, luckily that’s exactly what it is.

The main aim of the game is to unlock new areas

Upon finishing Gaia, I was left feeling thankful that I had finally gathered the last piece of material I needed to. The main aim of the game is to unlock new areas of land on each planet by spending an array of different currencies. But the extent of each type of currency needed is unnecessarily large. Multiple times I had to grind for certain materials in order to unlock a new hexagon of land, just for that area to be absolutely barren; in turn asking for another 200 specific crystal types to unlock another (most likely also empty) section of earth. The game felt extremely repetitive and tiring all throughout.

The gameplay was simple and easy to follow

The music felt like generic uninspired RPG-style music, and the lack of specific enemy, boss or even area music made the world feel empty. While the art style did what it needed to for a game of this calibre, and the design of enemies and NPC characters were fine, I feel like My Little Universe could benefit greatly from a distinctive style, something to make it stand out from the masses of low-poly cel-shaded games we’ve been seeing over the past few years.

The gameplay was simple and easy to follow and get into, although the tutorial went too in depth into certain aspects of the game and didn’t touch on some at all. This led the game to feel almost too easy at times, combat especially. Hordes of enemies would randomly appear in areas you’ve just left, or if you were unlucky enough, they would spawn directly next to you whilst in a menu. Luckily, they’re very easily dispatched by simply just holding down the attack button and occasionally moving backwards.

This seemed like quite a harsh punishment for death

The game may have been a little trickier if I had chosen to play ‘Manual’ mode, rather than ‘Automatic’, but give me the option to more easily destroy trees and rocks to gather the thousands of materials I need and I won’t say no. I only died in combat once, resulting in one of my level-up upgrades removed. This seemed like quite a harsh punishment for death considering throughout the game I had no idea what objectives granted me EXP, and the level-up rewards were seemingly random. A game like this would benefit greatly from a set skill-tree, rather than random unlockables.

Rating

3/10

My Little Universe succeeds in some aspects. Its simple art style works well for the type of game it is and it is low intensity meaning anyone can run it, especially with easy to follow gameplay. However it can be too simple, and too repetitive, frustratingly so at times, especially once gathering a lot of a certain type of material just to have to get even more.