Darwinia
March 5, 2010 fun, games, play
So I decided to take the leap after the short demo and bought Darwinia + on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). It’s the kind of game made by people like me, who grew up playing games on Spectrums and Commodores, but that doesn’t mean the charm would be lost on anyone else. It’s a real time strategy (RTS) game where you are tasked to firstly look after, then guide and sometimes get a helping hand from, a group of little green men known as Darwinians, that all exist in some scientist’s experimental computer.
The game looks like a sunny day out in Tron, with large neon rivers to span, electric trees that pulsate and the bleeps and squeaks of an ethereal ghost inside the machine trying to get out. The creator, who looks suspiciously like Sir Clive Sinclair himself, guides you through building an endless supply of units to combat the evil dragons, worms and spiders, which threaten the Darwinians peaceful existence. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously though , at one point joking about how the Dawinians managed to track down a picture of the creator on his hard drive and decide to broadcast it across the sky with glee, obscuring the normally pixelated clouds with his face.
The campaign mode itself took me an enjoyable 6 hours to play through, the challenge not coming from keeping your units alive but from trying to coordinate an attack as quick as possible. With an unlimited supply of squads to deploy, managing your resources is not a factor and it plays out differently to most other RTS games. This makes it quite relaxed and devoid of the stress factor, if you make a mistake you can quite simply start again, but only by performing faster and more efficiently will the game allow you to advance. Although playing Multiwinia, the online versus mode, is very different and playing a human opponent becomes a real battle of wits.
The game is another great example of what XBLA can deliver. Perhaps Darwinia + is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it can be made and distributed so simply that it allows the freedom for small teams to still make games, no matter how obscure or abstract the idea. It harks back to the old days of bedroom coders, and whilst nowadays games can sometimes overwhelm film and art in size and scope, there is the rather comforting feeling of logic to quite simply see your green pixels shooting some red ones.
Darwinia + is available for the XBox 360 and PC and is around £10. More information can be found here.
