Lemmings what fight.
By Bog

Every once in a while, I come across a game I know I'll be playing a lot. It's rare, too rare sometimes that I pick up the controls, have a swift waggle, and think, “Right. I can put off re-editing my showreel 'til next week.”

In the case of Darwinia, it's so chock-full of geek-culture references and little hooks that I couldn't stop playing the demo, and when I got the full game, a whole week of so-called free time disappeared, and so did the tan I got on holiday.

In describing why I think you should all go and buy this right now, it's tempting to employ the very popular device, “X is like Y crossed with Z on >INSERT DRUG<”. It's a lazy way to describe things, and despite having so very many familiar factors, both visual and in the gameplay, Darwinia really defies that analysis. Cannon Fodder crossed with Lemmings on PCP? Well, a little. Command and Conquer crossed with Mutual Assured Destruction on bad acid? Kinda, in spots.

I think Judas Priest are playing next week.

Thing is, for all of its not merely shameless but blatant draws on games and films of yesteryear, this is very much its own game. Yeah, there are a lot of familiar components, but I've never seen 'em all put together in just this way. We're all familiar with Tron, we all remember Centipede, we can all spot a Space Invader from across a crowded room with ten pints of heavy in us having just lost our specs down the loo. However, as lovely as these things are to see in their sexy new incarnations, when has a pretty face ever been enough?

This game is fun, and surprisingly large in scope. Let's have a quick checklist of game elements:
- Thoroughly Violent Third-Person Shooty Goodness: Check.
- Tech Tree containing enticingly splattermongous upgrades: Check.
- Seething battles with a cast of thousands: Check.
- More Thoroughly Violent ‘Splodey Shootiness: Yup.
- Things to Make and Do: Mmm-hm!
- Thick Swathes of Nasties to Brutally Violate: Indeedy!
- Geek-Friendly Plot: Oh, yus.

Yes, I'm talking about plot in the review of a shooter. Wuh? Because it's Good. I really wanted to be Flynn, sticking it to the MCP from within. I still get misty if I ever see JOSHUA 5 on a monitor. I'll sit all the way through ‘Hackers’ with my entire belief-space of what happens in a computer unplugged and parked on the side, because it's fun and I want to believe it, even if only for a few hours.

…in trees.

It takes in every hoary computer-sci-fi cliché in the book, but as with the Space Invaders, the Tron recognisers and everything else, it's had the serial numbers filed off, the paint-job changed, and it feels new again. I ended up having a real guilt-trip over sending thousands of my witless little Darwinian guys in Human Wave assaults on bad-guy positions, hearing their reedy little screams and occasionally screaming myself as previously-unnoticed heavy weapons started puréeing them, tearing their frail two-dimensional bodies apart in a spray of pixels, leaving their discorporated souls floating upwards, accompanied by the little box-kites that their kind use to mark a death.

Butterflies on a wheel, oh my brothers.

Gameplay, then? The move-and-shoot stuff is fairly straightforward, a ‘WASD the camera’, clicky-shooty affair that's very Cannon Fodder, but everything else is done with a gesture-drawing system. The gesture-thing can be a bit off-putting, as it is much slower than just clicking a Rocket Launcher or Spawn Engineer button. It makes you think ahead a bit, planning what loadout you're going to give your squads to go seize a certain valley, and after a while it gets nicely intuitive to doodle out the right scrawl. And, more importantly, it adds to the immersion of the game's little universe, drawing you in ever deeper into its tale of AIs, viruses and obsessive middle-aged coders.

None of which, for that matter, pushes you away from the sweet, sweet carnage that's so fun to wreak.

There are a couple of minor niggles. It’s pretty short. I beat it over a weekend, so some truly ninja gamers could probably storm through to the end in well under a day. However, there's a seriously lively mod community, and some of the game and map packs emerging are polished, professional-feeling affairs, and the developers themselves look like they're planning to expand on the original story. Yay.

Secondly, the game can get a bit grunt-intensive, especially when there are heeeyoooj battles going on - the physics of a grenade going off in a pack of 2000 little green fellas, and all that. This is a transient niggle, though, and players with a good-spec system won't notice it at all.

One nice aspect, while I'm talking about machines, is its platform availability. PC, Mac and strangely even Linux versions are available. I've only played the PC version, so I’ve no idea how it plays on these other platforms, but it's nice to see indie game developers writing for less-used platforms. And for Linux.

Darwinia 's got a lot to it. It's as pretty as a pretty thing, and brim-full of dearly-beloved references from the last 25 years. It’s very blasty. Also, if you buy it online from the developers, like all good children do, it's only £20. Which is sod-all for a game of this quality. Do it.

www.darwinia.co.uk

June 2005

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