Best Of

Having never played Darwinia, I'm not sure how Multiwinia ended up in my steam library (the latter is a continuation of the former)... but hey, why not? Darwinia has a cute story. Some researcher creates a digital world and digital denizens (Darwinians) by stringing together bazillions of old computers, accidentally deifies himself to the Darwinians by plastering his face all over their sky (lol professors), and in an attempt to find their god, the Darwinians access the researcher's email and accidentally download a virus which begins fucking them up. This is what I can gather from the bits and pieces of lore (read: map descriptions). I'm sure I have it all wrong, but I didn't bother to look it up. Multiwinia takes place in the same world, but after the Virus has been eliminated... and apparently after the Darwinians have shot themselves off into space in a rocket, or something. I guess the Darwinians evolved into multi-colored Multiwinians that all hate each other, and live for nothing more than the sweet, sweet taste of genocide. *The red tribe is a filthy people, and must be crushed under the bootheel of glorious green Multiwinians.*
...As you may have guessed, I have no idea what's going on. This is not Multiwinia's fault, it's mine for not playing Darwinia. Both DW and MW are over-simplified RTS games. MW is a multiplayer-only version of DW, without the storyline. Unfortunately, it seems this game has faded into obscurity - I was never able to reach the master multiplayer server, and had instead to settle for playing against bots. The devs had a very interesting take on the RTS genre. In the 'Winias, you only have one unit (though you're allowed two formations... either 'in formation' or 'en masse'). You don't choose to recruit or build the unit - you are GIVEN multiples of this unit at specified intervals based on your holdings. You may not individually select units - attempting to select less than 20 at a time is difficult. You may only select units in a certain radius (making a spread-out army damn near impossible). What's this mean for you? Micromanaging is damn near impossible, positioning is infinitely important, and terrain plays a huge role in making anything work. You can promote officers that will send any idle Multiwinians to a specified location, or you can order them screaming into battle yourself, firing lasers at their misguided foes. When they die (and they commonly die en masse), they utter cat-like digital screams and their little souls go floating away into the digital nether. The cutest death. A particularly interesting mechanic involves randomized 'crates' (if you're a 'No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination' kind of gamer, you should probably leave now). These crates fall from the sky randomly about the map, and one can send contingents of one's army to collect them. Upon collection, you may receive a power up (such as the sweet air strike in the screenshot below), some irritating handicap (the crate was full of plague! Hooray!), or some global effect, like slowing down or speeding up the whole game (completely unnecessary, mostly just an arcade gimmick). From reading around the web, these crates are either genius or idiotic. They're a randomized piece of asymmetric gameplay - nothing is better than hatching monstrous eggs on top of an enemy swarm. To be fair, nothing is worse than having YOUR swarm blown apart by the same. These can swing games, or do absolutely nothing. *If you look closely, you can see the air strike is carried out by brown space invaders.*
The game supports a wealth of playmodes, and single player maps to check them all out. Unfortunately, they are VERY poorly balanced. Easily the most interesting is the 'assault' gameplay (or 'defend the wonder' for you AoE players out there), but with the imposed 10 - 15 minute timers and the ridiculous imbalance of power re: Multiwinian vs gun encampment, there's seldom any way for the attacker to win vs anything but a dumb bot. Other playmodes were clearly not thought through, such as this capture the flag mode: with the opponent completely wiped out, I am still forced to endure the remainder of the 10 minute timer. This happened on around eight different occasions. *Without an enemy to fight, the green Multiwinians turned to their first love - knitting*
Overall, I found it a rather enjoyable - if simple - romp. The game has a tiny memory footprint (and also only occupies about 50 MB on your HDD!), the art is quirky and pleasing, there are a pretty healthy number of maps and gametypes, and the random crates and short game times make it hard to get irritated at what is actually a rather challenging game (at least, on the maps where the bots don't have an obviously exploitable behavior). Downsides would be the lack of existing multiplayer and poor balance on more than a few maps. There's not enough content without multiplayer that I would pay to play this, but if it were already on my machine and I needed to kill an hour... why not? *Myrmidon is always the winner.*