High: The high point of this game hands down is the gameplay, a great game over all.
Low: The sound of laser shooting seemed very repetitive, I did hate the pixel effect in which each 3-d program's edges were pixilated.

Today I will be reviewing Darwinia which was developed by Introversion Software and published by Cinemaware Marquee. Darwinia is a real time strategy game (RTS), you start out as a stranger who wandered onto Dr. Sepulveda's work, Darwinia. Darwinia is a world filled with peace and harmony among the little 2-D green men. Sadly that came to an end once the evil red virus began to spread, killing several thousand Darwinians. This is where you come in. Your job is to go from city to city ridding each of this harmful virus while also building the Darwinian population back to its original numbers.

Darwinia is quite simple really but has stunning game play and epic battles against the red virus. You are to use "programs" such as the squad to help with the fight against the red virus. There are four programs you can run each offer a unique service. The officer allows you to turn any regular Darwinian into a leader who can tell Darwinians where they are supposed to go. The squad is basically a troop of soldiers that you command. Now the armor is a bit different since you need Darwinians to run it. The Armor is used as both a shuttle system and battle canon but once it has been turned into a battle cannon it must stay that way. Finally, the engineer reprograms the various buildings around Darwinia and gather lost Darwinian souls. You can then bring Darwinians back to life with the incubator. I'll go into more detail with this a bit later.

Now onward to the various virus incarnations. The red virus has learned to evolve into 9 different species. The fiercest by far is the Soul Destroyer. The Soul Destroyer is the only flying Virus and can in one swoop eliminate an entire squad. The Soul Destroyer also has the ability to completely destroy Darwinian Souls. The Army Ants are quite easy to kill when alone but when they swarm around you there is nothing to do but admit defeat. These Army Ants also gather lost souls and bring them to their hive in which thousands of Army Ants are born. The Spider, however, usually hunts alone. They often pounce upon their prey and can kill a squad in one leap. These creepy crawlies also have the ability to lay eggs in which Viruses are born. Now Viruses are the 2-D snake like creatures that are found in each city in the thousands. The Viruses are quite easy to kill, just throw in a grenade and dozens parish.

The GUI for Darwinia is quite unique since you do not have all the usual clutter that a RTS game has instead you only have a small list of running programs and a dialog box for Dr. Sepulveda. Darwinia also has a Task Manager which can be displayed by pressing Alt. The Task Manager allows you to specify what programs you want the doctor to work on but more importantly this is where you create your units. At first you can only create three units but this is later upgraded to six. Three units don't seem like much at first but it will definitely help in the long run.

The music within Darwinia always flowed smoothly with the game play as well as the cut scenes. As for the sound effects the laser shooting seemed very repetitive but other than that the 1000 sound effects made for Darwinia were on cue and worked nicely with the game play. The graphics were much better than what screenshots illustrate them as though I did hate the pixel effect in which each 3-d program's edges were pixilated.

All in all Darwinia is a must buy game. Darwinia has the best game play style of any game I've recently seen. The programs, viruses, and sound effects all fit together nicely making this game the game of the month by my standards. I would definitely recommend Darwinia to any person needing an RTS fix as it is very enjoyable and addicting. Now go save them Darwinians.

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Reviewed By:Aaron Lockard Reviewed On: Mon, 26 June 2006 10:05:22 Read:

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