Darwinia+

Darwinia, a world within a world. A digital realm conceived and nurtured by Sir Clive Sinclair – OK so not him but someone who looks VERY like him – a world with a population of digital denizens who have through many generations grown, matured and created an entire culture inside the computers of a research laboratory.

Quite why a virus was allowed into such an environment we’ll never know, nor is it likely that we’ll understand why the good Prof. can’t take a few hours out of his day and sort his own mess out… but be that as it may, the task now falls to you. Yes you must help the Darwinians, eradicate the virus in all of its forms and restore order and balance to Darwinia!

I’ve got to be honest with you here, when I first started the game up I was, well let’s just say slightly underwhelmed. I’ve not played in the first version of Darwinia (note this is Darwinia+) so my frame of reference is different from those that have, but my initial thoughts were “Oh… Small green stick figures and a polygon landscape. OK let see how long this lasts then!”.

But dammit if this isn’t addictive! It took me a little while to figure out how to do things as the introduction/tutorial and help are limited to say the least but are apparently head and shoulders above the original help.

You start with a small map and a relatively easy set of objectives to work though using the two units at your disposal; Engineers who make things work and Squads who shoot things. It’s easy to get gung-ho and simply blat around shooting stuff ignoring the seemingly redundant bits of architecture which the Engineers can reprogram, but this would be a mistake as each one of these ‘Research Stations’ allows the good Professor to conduct more research into weapons, controls, squad strength etc. These are very important later in the game when things get difficult.

And difficult they do get. From the initial pick work viruses – an easy kill – you move up to big red snake viruses which are faster, multi-segmented and regenerate. Then there are the spider variants which will jump on your squad and kill ’em dead, the egg dropper viruses which float up and down and drop pick virus filled eggs, the flying snake viruses and the triffid viruses which shoot out eggs containing red snakes and spiders. These all need to be blatted but you have to be strategic in your approach, it’s no good clearing one island of creeping death if there’s a triffid on another popping over new batches of work, you have to go and get it. Killing the big egg droppers take a lot of grenades timed right, which means a big squad, which means plenty of research, which means…. well you get the idea!

The ultimate goal is to release the green Darwinians from their virus-bondage and enable them to run the machines which power their world. Oh you’ll need to appoint Officers to make sure they head in the right direction to do this too, did I mention that?!

SO! Squads, Engineers, Armour units (did I mention them?!) Officers, Darwinians, machines, strategy and viruses. What more could any game wish to deliver! I can answer that – how about a bit of a break!

I got to a point in Darwinia+, a point after which I didn’t care any more. A point where the frustration overcame the desire to resolve the issues I saw and where turning it off and getting a cup of tea and a biscuit was the right, next logical step. I’m sure that there will be those folk out there who will relish the challenge of defeating the flying snakes, of working out exactly how to deploy Armour successfully but I’ve got to be honest, if I need to ask Mr. Google how to do something in a game, I’m sure that there’s a problem with the game rather than me.