The second Introversion game. Will give gamers something new to play and enjoy.
The story of Darwinia is that the game is set in the world’s first digital theme park. But it isn’t fun at the fair like you would expect, there has been a virus that has created monsters of sorts that have put the inhabitants of Darwinia: the Darwinians to the brink of extinction. But you arrive by luck as the doctor who made the world is trying to save the remaining Darwinians and put things right. It’s also your job to save the Darwinians and destroy the virus that has spread across Darwinia.
Although this game is a RTS game, it doesn’t follow the rule of building a base at the beginning of the level or creating armies and sending them out. All you have got at your disposal is the Darwinians. They are not directly controllable as they are controlled by AI and they will do things by themselves if you don’t give them orders to carry out. They also need to be created with souls that are collected by Engineers. There are some programs, which you can make use of yourself. To begin with these are the Squad and Engineer programs. The squad is a few soldiers that you have control of you can also get hold of the research to arm them with different secondary weapons, such as grenades, air strikes (you place a beacon for aircraft to bomb that point and rockets. The engineers are your work horse of reprogramming buildings so you can use them and to collect souls to create Darwinians. As Darwinians are the most important things you will need as they can use buildings to aid you and when they are able to fight for themselves, it means some work is lifted from you.
To run programs you have to create a gesture in the program window. If you have played the original Black and White game, it would come easily to you to create a gesture. Personally I find it a bit of a pain. As you have to be careful when making a gesture as if you get it wrong, you get a ‘syntax error’ and have to do the gesture again. I only have trouble with making gestures to change a squad’s secondary weapon, but when you have made a gesture almost identical to how you are shown it. You get a little miffed and some words will be said… Especially when you make a very half baked attempt at running a different program and it's accepted. The gestures are a nice idea as I don't see it very often in a game, but I just wished they had an alternative.
The game isn’t a game to push your newest hardware as the game is designed to look like a virtual world. But by virtual you always think a few years ago before 3D accelerated games or VR games that you heard of and saw but never got a chance to play with yourself. So for me I was able to run the game with the settings all on with it only going down to 30 frames per second when I was looking at an entire area when there was virus completely dominating it and that is with a Geforce 4. The only other thing that may push old hardware a bit is making loads of explosions at once on your enemies as the explosions look pretty funky with the old VR style and they seem a little more satisfying than some explosions I've seen in RTS games as well ^__^. Another interesting touch is how the programs you run as well as the enemies can be in sprite mode for that old look as the sprites are really low resolution and kinda messes with my head when I play the game on 1280x1024 resolution. Or you can have a full 3D version of the programs and monsters, I prefer that to be honest as it’s just easier for me to tell where they are when looking at them from an angle.
The controls are also simple but good except like I said earlier; when trying to run certain programs. The direction keys are used to move the camera around an area, whilst the mouse is used for looking around, selecting programs and making them do stuff. It’s that easy. But it may take some getting used to not using the mouse to scroll around the map and that moving the mouse turns the camera.
The audio is strange as the game’s sounds are all just beeps, boops and various other electronic noises. You never hear any English speech as the Darwinians and the programs have their own voices that to us don’t make a great deal of sense. The music however is usually slow and somewhat sad to me, it kinda goes with how Darwinia is almost completely wasted because of the viral outbreak. It is nice to listen to though. But there isn't really much else to say about the game's audio other than that.
Personally I enjoyed playing through this game as you were given new problems and challenges as you made progress. It also got me into the habit of playing this in the style of 'let's eliminate one more island of virus!' The game itself is only a single player, but don’t let it stop you from getting this if you just like to play against people on-line in RTS games. It has its charm of being not like your usual game. Plus it isn’t a demanding game in terms of requirements either. So I would recommend it to anyone who likes something different in their game and to RTS fans. Also Steam users will soon be able to purchase this on-line through the Steam service.