Too many supposed strategy games concern themselves with feeding the troops rather than commanding them – you wouldn’t have found Field Marshall Hague or Alexander the Great serving up in the canteen. The autonomy of the Darwinians neatly avoids the tedious micro-management of other RTS games, in which you often find yourself desperately juggling the needs of hundreds of individual units rather than focusing on the battle itself. Pathfinding has been improved drastically, with Darwinians no longer able to get irrevocably defeated by a small, polygonal hill. However, you can also gather up a small selection of the green chappies and direct them to a spot manually, although their behaviour on the way and once they arrive is still in the hands of their AI. The implicit control system for the Darwinians themselves remains, with ‘officers’ pointing the way for the little critters who otherwise behave autonomously. If you’ve played Darwinia you’ll feel right at home here, although that’s not to say that Introversion haven’t made some substantial changes. An interactive tutorial is also included that should get complete beginners up to speed. By the time the match begins you already know where you should be heading and what you should do when you get there. Once the playing area has loaded on-screen prompts highlight the crucial areas, performing much of the same role as the movies accompanying each of Team Fortress 2 ’s maps. Multiwinia immediately makes a better first impression, with a stylish but decidedly standard menu setup that provides useful information on each game mode and enables you to get playing quickly. A single player game can occasionally survive such a handicap a multiplayer game will suffer if players are unable to grasp the gameplay potential quickly. Although this was partially rectified in later updates there remained a geek barrier between the game and more casual players. While it was a slick and involving system once you had grasped the basics, it was so different to anything seen before – or since – that it was less of a learning curve and more of a vertical cliff-face without any safety wire. One problem that afflicted Darwinia and no doubt contributed to its initially slow sales was its unusual interface. Multiplayer options were conspicuous by their absence in Darwinia, so it’s a natural step forwards the question is whether there’s going to be enough to justify Multiwinia ’s existence as standalone title and whether existing Darwinia fans will feel compelled to part with more of their cold, hard cash. Which brings us neatly to Multiwinia, a multiplayer sort-of sequel to their earlier classic.
Introversion’s fortunes flipped overnight, boosted even further by receiving high profile awards at the Independent Games Festival, and they were suddenly on the map, in the money and looking to the future. Part of its new remit was to locate independent games and bring them to the masses, with Darwinia becoming one of the first to benefit from Steam’s wide userbase. Three years ago any article about Introversion and its games would have been prefaced with something along the lines of “you might not have heard of them, but …” In 2005 sales were not matching the critical acclaim for early titles Uplink and Darwinia, with only a small but loyal fanbase standing between the UK team and the place where developers go to die.Īt the same time Valve’s delivery platform, Steam, was in the throes of reinventing itself, transforming from a clunky Half Life 2 / Counterstrike front-end into the massive online store and community it is today.
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