Darwinia

A charming little game full of personality

Overall score:

I feel that I should start this review by talking about gaming 'in the old days.' The problem with that is, what what most people regard as 'the old days,' I regard as 'before I was born.' To me, retro is Doom 1. Warcraft 2. C&C (the original one, complete with dudes on bikes and improbably named factions). No, I cannot really talk about retro gaming. Which is kind of a shame, since Darwinia is all about the retro.

Darwinia was created by the crazy guys at Introversion Software, a three-man, computer-in-the-bedroom outfit here in the UK. They achieved (geek) fame and (very mild) riches with their first game, Uplink. Darwinia follows the theme of Uplink: gameplay first, graphics to fit the game, rather than the other way around. In Uplink, the graphics worked perfectly because you were, after all, playing a hacker. Having it all look like windows worked wonders for the immersion.

In Darwinia, Introversion decided to take the template of C&C, cut it into very small pieces, and then make a rather unique game from them. The backstory is a rather cheeky satire of Sir Clive Sinclair, the UK inventor who brought out a console (the ZX Spectrum) in the early 80’s that was briefly successful but was later wiped out by the Japanese imports. From what I know, the Spectrum never caught on in the USA. Anyway, as the story goes, Sir Sinclair--sorry, 'Dr Sepulveda'--retreated into isolation and went on to invent a quantum computing method by stringing lots of the 80’s consoles together. He used this to create a digital world, filled with a race of digital beings, each with their own Artificial Intelligence.

He duly became the administrator of the world, guiding the inhabitants (named Darwinians) through hundreds of generations, aimed at the goal of making them a fully alive digital world, to be opened as a ‘digital theme park’. Of course, it wouldn’t be a computer game if something hadn’t gone wrong, and something had. A virus has mysteriously corrupted the digital realm of the Darwinians, corrupting them into red thingies that look very like monsters from early arcade games. Here is where you step in, as you use programs (including soldiers, airstrikes and engineers) to defeat the red thingies.

The first thing you will notice when you fire up the game, and if you peruse the screenshots, is the graphical style. I find it very interesting, in that technically it’s extremely simple--some basic 3D objects, some sprites and coloured lights, all over an almost wiremesh terrain. And yet Darwinia is a beautiful game. Introversion software managed to create a triumph of aesthetical style over shallow technological prettiness. Darwinia is the only game I have ever purchased a poster of, just because it’s the first game I’ve found that won’t be graphically surpassed in one year's time--Darwinia’s brand of beauty isn’t dependent on being the latest pretty thing. Not bad for three guys with no budget.

In combination with the graphics is the very surprising depth of personality to the Darwinians. They are the green flat figures you see in the screenshots. They, despite being nothing more than a series of floating stickfigures, have more feeling of being real beings than most RPG’s villains. When enemies come near, they flee screaming in fear, unless you have given them guns, in which case they still scream and flee but shoot the hell out of the enemy. Later missions have you using officers, a type of unit that can order nearby Darwinians (they are not actually under your direct control), to fight masses of enemies. The resulting screaming and dying can be oddly disturbing. When a Darwinian dies, the other ones nearby will all gather around, create a small golden box, and sway gently for a short while before releasing the box into the sky, where it floats up towards the Darwinian heaven. Darwinians who die alone, or whose nearby comrades are all busy fighting, simply float up as green dots. Enemies who die turn into red dots. One of the few times I have ever felt sorry for not being a better player was after a particularly brutal invasion of an island in a later mission, watching dozens of green dots and golden boxes floating skywards.

The gameplay itself is really very simple. You summon units and upgrades for units, using either mouse gestures (akin to Black and Whites system) or the F1–F8 keys, and control them using the mouse. Your basic unit, that you will always use, is the Soldiers, who are a sort of blurry 3D model. Left mouse click on the terrain makes them move, right mouse fires their lasers, both buttons together fires their special weapon (an upgrade; either grenades, rockets or air strikes). Other units include the Engineer, who reprograms buildings for you, which allows you to create more Darwinians or to move soldiers around the map. The Engineer also collects the souls (the coloured dots) of dead Darwinians and enemies, and takes them to the buildings that will create Darwinians. There is no resources, other than Darwinians, so you can happily lose hundreds of soldiers in a single battle. The battles are arcadey, frantic things, all explosions and silly sound effects.

There isn’t really much more to the game than that, in terms of what you do. It’s a fun game, but simple. If you simply must have your supply lines and factors of attack and all that trot, you might not like Darwinia for that reason. If, however, you fancy a cheap, fun, fairly unobtrusive game that is oddly touching, I recommend you give Darwinia a chance. It’s available on Steam, along with a demo, or you can order a CD copy from the developers, but it is not available in shops outside the UK to the best of my knowledge.

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Entsuropi is British, and doesn’t do much of anything

Written by Charlie82 on February 20th, 2006