In just five short years, Minecraft has evolved from mere curiosity to unstoppable phenomenon. Gaming fads come and go, but while plastic Rock Band and Guitar Hero instruments continue to deteriorate in the closets, attics, and landfills of the world, Markus "Notch" Persson's creation still brings in hundreds of millions annually. With so many gamers willing to invest in the limitless potential of digital sandboxes, it shouldn't come as a surprise that developers are looking to steal Minecraft's fire with their own take on Notch's deviously simplistic toolset.

Omnigon's UemeU (YOO-myu) might not have the immediate, pixelated charm of Minecraft, but its take on world creation and manipulation offers a much-improved alternative. In an hour-long demo session, developer Jeremy Hindle -- one of nine people behind the game -- gave me a brief tour of UemeU, which only hinted at its potential.

Unlike vanilla Minecraft, which tasks you with building as an in-game character, UemeU contains both "build" and "play" modes, which can be switched between at on the fly to give you the power of creation without worrying about hostile factors from the surrounding world compromising your creativity. At the beginning of our demo session, Hindle used build mode's disembodied hand to summon a cube into his world, then quickly switched to his humanoid avatar to leap on top of it. While Hindle was the only person inhabiting this world, he explained that build and play modes can happen simultaneously, with one player bending and shaping the landscape at will while another runs through it as an avatar.

All of UemeU's creation takes place through an extremely clean and efficient interface of stacked menus that grow progressively deeper depending on your needs. Any object you create in UemeU's world can be given basic scripting, and, during our hour with the game, Hindle showed off the variety of options available to players. With a few clicks, Hindle made his cube transition between colors, then set up a simple animation loop to have it rotate above the ground in a circular pattern, Super Mario-style. We didn't have enough time to see all of the options available, but the handful on display showed off UemeU's potential as an tool for budding game designers. Assets can be copied and pasted at will, equipped with triggers that cause any number of actions to happen to other objects, and can even be given their own distinct gravity and lighting. And while UemeU will discourage you from going too crazy with creation, you'll still have free reign; go ahead and dump thousands of objects in your world, but don't be surprised if your CPU can't keep up.

Hindle made it clear that UemeU will be reliant on its community, which is why it includes options to make it friendlier than Minecraft's multiplayer mode. You can set various permissions for your world, so if you'd like to invite people inside without worrying about possible vandals, alterations can be off-limits. Hindle stressed that people got the most out of Minecraft through the use of mods, which is why the game contains an intelligent patching system similar to other multiplayer games like Counter-Strike. Everything you need for a mod will be downloaded and applied temporarily when you log onto a server, which eliminates the need for the sort of third-party programs Minecraft makes use of. UemeU also keeps file sizes as small as your average Word document, so you can quickly share your creations without worrying about external hosting.

UemeU is certainly impressive, even in its alpha stage, but it's a game that's going to sink or swim based on the size of its user base alone. And with the Minecraft juggernaut not showing any signs of slowing down soon, UemeU's straightforward interface and its comparatively superior set of tools might not be enough to sway users from the siren song of Minecraft. If UemeU's suite of tools sounds interesting, £6.99 is all you'll need to pick it up in its early state, with frequent updates to come -- though it can be had for free if you'd like to experiment without the luxury of saving your creations.