I came across the Darwinia website when I was just surfing around at work. It looked pretty wild. Now its been released and I’ve played the demo and well… the guys from Introversion will soon have another paying playing customer.

I’d consider myself to be an old school gamer. I was raised on a diet of Atari classics like the 400, 800XL and of course the ST. I consider that period to be possibly the golden age of games. They were simple, had blocky sprites, beeping soundtracks and would, by todays gamers, be considered completely lame. But they had one thing that many games of today don’t have… an elegant simplicity that completely disguised their amazing playability. If I totalled how many hours I’ve spent playing Boulderdash for example, it would completely dwarf the time I’ve spent on many modern games… add into the time I’ve spent painting houses in Bristles or recovering parts from ship wrecks in Koronis Rift or shooting simple geometric primitvies in Backlash and well… the time I’ve spent playing modern games pales into insignificance.

Older, simpler games have this ‘X’ factor. They draw you in… keep you coming back for more. Now imagine such classics as Defender, reworked and restyled and you have the kind of game that PomPom make… Now enter Darwinia.

This game appears to have it all. Original idea, lush graphics, nice sound and so far amazing gameplay. My hat is off for the guys at Introversion. Its awesome. I can’t big it up enough and I’ve only played the demo :-/ I downloaded it last night, fired it up and then spent several hours playing the demo level. I WANT MORE and I WANT IT NOW!!!

So what can I tell you about Darwinia? The story goes something like this… you help the Darwinians. Their home world (a virtual digital themepark… Darwinia) has been overrun by a virus. Using the limited tools available (Officers, Squads and Engineers) you have to rid the place of the virus and the other nasties its spawned and help the Darwinians get their homeworld up and running again. It is in effect a realtime strategy that has its roots in the golden age of gaming.

Instead of going for photorealism, as seems to be the norm these days, they’ve gone for a classic wiremesh type landscape mixed with a good helping of 3D objects and sprites. There are no icons and hardly any options. The keys you need are A, S, D and W with Ctrl+C, Alt, Tab and Space and of course your trusty mouse and thats it. Its easy to learn. Easy to play although the mouse wheel could do with a reverse option. All in all its an amazing game. Elegant simplicity combined with the power of todays PC’s… an awesome combination. If you like realtime strategy and want something a little different, grab the demo and take a peek.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2005 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Gaming, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.