Fata Deum is a god game or a godsim, a sub-genre of strategy games and artificial life games like Populous or Black and White.
God games allow people to take control of a god who has limited powers which grow in power the more believers the god has, and it becomes your job to convert people into believing in you to grow your powers and in turn the city/civilization that you are influencing.
In Fata Deum you are exactly that god with limited powers and can only perform a couple of miracles to influence the people of various towns and cities. Each day you can only perform one of these propaganda miracles to make the people believe in you. You can either fill them with fear or love, depending on what kind of god you want to be: good or evil. I am guessing that you can go some kind of middle road, a grey jedi way if you like, but I am not sure of that since the preview copy I got is just a demo and I only get 5 in game days to play, which gives me plenty of time to get a feel for the mechanics and controls but not nearly enough to know if middle game and late game are as fun as the early game.
The gameplay loop is as follows: during the day you perform miracles for people to make them either love or fear you, and you will receive yin and yang points depending on which it is, with these points you get access to different miracles, devotions and buildings. When you’ve converted at least 50% of the population of a village and city, you get more control over it. Once the day is over the game goes into night mode where you can influence the people with devotions and building different types of buildings.
Devotions are like orders you can give your followers at night, for example, raid a city. You can also tell them to build buildings, like watch towers and barracks, farms and taverns. All depending on how you want to play your god.
Yes, the game is quite fun, but is very annoying to control. The control scheme needs some work in my opinion. Fata Deum gives you a view from high up to view the world and the cities, and you control the movement or panning of the screen with WASD, like many strategy and tactic games do but in Fata Deum, when you press the W key to pan up or north, the camera goes forward instead, like you are playing a first-person game, which in turn makes it an exercise in frustration in trying to move around the world and do god stuff. Then there is the issue with the space bar. In some menus, like the miracle menu where you choose which miracles to perform for the people, you press the space bar to switch between good and evil miracles, but then in the evening you use the space bar to finish the evening and start the next day. I have often ruined my evenings by accidentally pressing the space bar to switch between menus only to start the next day and therefore ruining that run as I only have 5 in game days to play and every time you mess up an evening that run is pretty much over.
These issues do limit my enjoyment of the game but probably wouldn’t be a major issue if you could change the controls but the only options you have is the sensitivity of moving and zooming and that does not help at all. I really hope this will be fixed in future updates but I am not very optimistic since the game will be released in a couple of days.
The graphics are pretty and the sound design is decent. There is a lot of potential here but the control scheme really ruins it for me personally and makes it nearly unplayable. Maybe you can get used to it but I can’t be bothered with getting used to awkward controls when there is so much to play out there.
More details for Fata Deum can be found here.
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