The camera is a little fiddly at times, but my biggest complaint is that the simulator doesn't come with any sound or music. It's far more fun mucking about with those than creating your own universe from scratch. After that, you're on your own in the cosmos, albeit with a stack of fansubmitted simulations to play around with. Universe Sandbox won't tell you a story, and it's not going to hold your hand beyond a brief tutorial that introduces the interface. Not every single physical process is perfectly modelled (partly because we don't yet perfectly understand every physical process), but it's accurate enough to answer important questions such as “what's the most efficient way to hurl the Earth into the sun?” The answer, if you were wondering, is to stop it dead in its orbit.Īs with most games of this type, you have to be content to make your own fun. That's what elevates this above most other physics simulations: the balance maintained between ensuring that processes are accurately represented and simultaneously ensuring that the sim is accessible enough to pick up and play with. After a while, they clump together into little groups like baby planets. One scenario has baseballs, dice, golfballs and footballs orbiting a 20cm-wide bowling ball. Universe Sandbox's most impressive achievement, however, lies in illustrating how the force of gravity affects every tiny little object in all of existence. Which, if you think about it, is a bit bleak. A few hundred years later, the solar system was little more than a series of concentric rings of dust. Mercury was the first to smear out into a ring, followed by the remains of Venus, Earth and Mars. Or, best of all, shred the planet and leave it as a dusty space cloud.Īfter loading up a model of our solar system, I methodically turned every single planet to dust, and sped up time so that each second in the real world was ten days in the simulation. You can simply delete a planet, but it's far more fun to explode it into eight chunks.
The options you have for destruction are nearly as diverse as the options for construction. Or accidently blowing up Jupiter and watching the debris form into a second asteroid belt. Accidentally making Earth the same size as the Sun and pinging Mercury and Venus out past Uranus, Neptune and the Kuiper belt into the interstellar medium, for example. If you get it right, their orbit carves a graceful arc across the empty darkness of space.
You put rocks in space, set various physical properties such as velocity, mass and density, then watch them whizz about while cackling with glee at your power over the universe. It's simply a physics sandbox that focuses on doing one thing right: gravity.
There are no bosses, no buffs or power-ups, no levelling-up system, and no objective. Judging Universe Sandbox as a game seems a little unfair.
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