| |
Darwinia 
Release date: 4 Mar 2005
|
Mygamer review
|
Natural Selection
‘Indie’ seems to be the hot buzzword of the moment, with indie music ripping up the charts and indie films posting sales rivaling big budget productions. Is it time for indie videogames to do the same? Yes, if Darwinia, from four-man developer Introversion, is any indication.
Darwinia is a refreshing real-time strategy title, which focuses mainly on the strategy. The first time you boot it up you’ll instantly realize that this game isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before. Much of its charm radiates from the radical design, primarily in the graphics engine. The game’s bare polygons and solid textures seem stripped-down at first but, upon closer inspection, they’re clean, crisp, and nothing you would have ever expected.
The game’s narrative background unfolds like this: Dr. Sepulveda is the genius behind the Protologic computer. When his Protologic 68000 is a sales failure, he decides to use the thousands of redundant models to build a revolutionary network of supercomputer proportions. He uses this network to develop ‘Digital Life’, a virtual world where each of the computers has a digital soul. Unfortunately, the system becomes overrun by malicious code, and the digital souls of his machines are trapped. This is where you come in. In this virtual world, your task is to rescue these souls—the Darwinians.
This story, while not exactly novel worthy, allows for the unique design elements that are the main attraction of Darwinia. Because it’s set in a digital world, the game looks like a digital world. More importantly, because this world consists of computer code and software, computer code and software are what you use to battle the viruses and free the Darwinians. This is critical to the gameplay, as instead of collecting resources and building an army, as in most RTS titles, you execute and control programs in order to complete objectives.
It sounds like nothing more than an academic and aesthetic difference, but it transforms Darwinia from an average RTS to a truly revolutionary experience. Unlike similar games, there’s no limit to the number of units you can create. Instead, there’s a limit on how many programs can be running at any one time, and this seemingly subtle difference means that strategy, tactics, and timing are much more important. It’s rare to overwhelm enemies through sheer force, or to sit and wait as your troops build in number. Mistakes aren’t crippling, but even though you can simply create a new squad for battle if one is eliminated, getting them to the front is often half the fight.
While the squad is the single main combat unit, there is a choice of several secondary weapons with which to equip them. Grenades, rockets, and air strikes are all useful in different situations. There are also other non-combat units, like the engineer, vital to making progress through each stage, and the extremely important officer. Since you can’t directly control the rescued Darwinians, an officer is necessary to give them secondhand orders.
Darwinia looks exceptionally slick thanks to its ingenious interface. There are no on-screen icons or menus here; while playing, the only thing you’ll see is the action. The ‘alt’ button brings up the task manager, where you use the mouse to draw gestures. It’s kind of like writing on a Palm Pilot; each gesture is a few strokes used to represent the unit you want to create, or the action you want to take. Drawing a triangle creates a squad, while a check mark designates an officer. The task manager also lets you control things like which technology Dr. Sepulveda is helping you research. Choose a unit or a weapon and, over time, it will gradually improve.
Enemies range from fairly harmless strands of virus to dangerous spiders, centipedes and virus generators. Some are smarter than others and each has their own method of attack, and in more difficult levels the combinations of enemies appearing at the same time can be extremely challenging. Each level has a set of objectives, ranging from opening portals to another area, to saving a certain number of Darwinians. Because each level often has gateways to multiple other areas, progress is nonlinear and there’s a real sense of completion—even if you only have a few minutes to play.
However, the true beauty of Darwinia lies in its presentation. Things look simple on the surface; the ground is made of wire-frame polygons, the Darwinians are 2D sprites, and textures are often solid colors. But the overall design is a charming throwback to the golden age of videogames, when the arcade and the quarter ruled. There are references to 80’s games like the Space Invaders characters and the Recognizer from Tron, and Darwinia’s centipedes act suspiciously similar to those in the arcade game of the same name. This is all tied together with the audio, combining classic sound effects with a modern feel and a soundtrack alluding to traditional game themes. Anyone who grew up with the true videogame classics will immediately fall in love with the world of Darwinia.
There is really only one thing lacking. Packaged with the game is a map editor, but there is no online play of any kind. This type of game screams out for multiplayer action, and in fact that’s what made RTS as a genre so popular. The single-player game is deep and challenging enough to give you more than your money’s worth, however, and since Introversion is a small team this oversight is both understandable and forgivable.
Since Introversion consists of gamers who make games, you’ll find Darwinia available not only for Windows but also for Mac OSX, and even Linux. Unfortunately, you probably won’t find it at your local retailer, you’ll have to order it from the Introversion website where a demo is also available. The price is a more than reasonable $29.99USD, and even though located in the UK, the product ships quickly to those of us in the States and their customer service is direct and personable.
Because Introversion are independent and they’ve chosen a direct sales model of marketing, Darwinia will probably fly under the radar of the gaming public. Yet it deserves as much attention as the next big release from any of the huge publishers, mainly for the polished visuals but also for being a well-designed twist on the RTS genre. Introversion calls it a “digital dreamscape” but, whatever you want it call it, Darwinia will remind you that videogames can be an art form as well as great entertainment.
Review by Bennett Campbell on 15 May 2005
Bookark this reviews at:
|
No reviews yet, be the first to post a review and receive extra credits! |  Members review score: n/a |
|
You need to login to add a review |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
