A remarkable little world is playing out in a super computer, a whole species has been created called Darwinians, save them from the dangerous viral threat.

The story in Darwinia is quite interesting, the Darwinians is an artificial life form created by a Dr Sepulveda. The doctor guides you through the beginning of the game and presents to you the red viral threat that can get the Darwinians wiped out.

Your job is to help the Darwinians to fight the virus, you have several units at your disposal including laser squads and engineers. The units are also called programs, building them is called running a program.

Controlling the different squads are not that hard, you simply build them by pressing the tab-key and then place them on the map. Move them by clicking and right click for the squad to fire. I really like that Introversion manage to build a complex game but yet a straightforward control system that takes about 2 minutes to master.

The firing is quite interesting, the squads don’t fire by themselves, and the player has to choose the targets and fire. Engineers are built to improve buildings and the landscape, they do so automatically. This makes Darwinia a bit different than other real time strategy games.

There is also a lot more that makes the game differ. The graphics are the most visual difference. They are made in quite retro but with their own kind of style, with terrain modeled by squares. None of the units are modeled that great though, from some views they are paper-thin. However the graphics do communicate a dream world with really beautiful but weird stuff at times. It’s also possible to move the camera round freely, you can also zoom in and out. Usually when cameras are moved around freely it’s hard to find a good view, however in Darwinia it’s not a problem at all.

When playing it sometimes seems as if the enemy has no clear tactic on how to beat you. They don’t engage your squads until you come with in a certain distance of them, which means that you can safely place your units a couple of squares away and just fire. However when you get closer they instantly tries to attack you, and does so with devastating effect. It can actually be hard at times to determine the outcome of a battle.

The game has a good soundtrack, that adds a lot. But the sound effects don’t feel that powerful and needs a redo. But Darwinia is still a very addictive game, it resembles the Populous games a bit. It’s a game that gives you the opportunity to play a little bit of God and at the same time it gets you to think.

Requirements:
N/A
Tested on:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon Graphics Card

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