Multiwinia is effectively Darwinia turned into Worms - which means that while it's still undoubtedly fun as a lightweight experience, it's far from being cerebrally rewarding or especially clever. Whether your enemy gains access to nuclear weapons, airstrikes, lethal turrets, a range of evil spells, an infestation of Black Darwinians or Futurewinians, you're going to have a tough time regaining your lead. Multiwinia's most questionable element is its rebalancing system - do too well and your opponents suddenly gain access to supremely over-powered weapon drops, often completely tipping the game in their favour, which isn't much of a reward for your careful planning and skilled assaults. To further aid your assault, you've also access to weapon drops, which is perhaps where the game comes a little unstuck. Admittedly, there's only one possible formation available - phalanx - but it makes a big difference in combat, marshalling your Darwinians into a structure that's much more vicious from the front, and very vulnerable from the sides. Now you can promote Darwinians to Officers at will, enabling you to direct your tiny army's flow from spawn points or to create formations. That said, there are some notable additions to Multiwinia's borrowed mechanics. Perhaps more so following the removal of Darwinia's gesture-activated weapon system, it's a game that thrives on superficial spectacle, eschewing deeper game mechanics for visceral thrills. Although Darwinia's core elements have been expanded to suit multiplayer gaming in Multiwinia, it still remains a conceptually limited strategy game. Whatever the mode, there's an irresistible sense of fun and subtle humour that makes the polygonal atrocities both exciting and endearing, especially when it's a friend's multi-coloured minions on the receiving end of your amassed firepower. For instance, in Capture the Statue you've got to secure land in order to transport giant figureheads (including a certain Companion Cube) back to your base in Assault, the defender has to use his limited entrenched forces to hold off an unlimited horde for a given time period. Winning criteria differs across Multiwinia's six game modes, but the overall theme is about gaining and holding ground. It's a game built on an apocalyptically epic scale and it's almost impossible to resist the cataclysmic spectacle, your newly-spawned Darwinians traipsing across various, weirdly-coloured landscapes and crushing microscopic polygon enemy forces in their thousands. As you'll already know if you've been following our extensive Multiwinia coverage, the game features six different game modes Domination, King of the Hill, Capture the Statue, Rocket Riot, Blitzkrieg and Assault, with a selection of maps enabling up to four-player combat against either AI opponents or a human. This time there's no plot and no exposition you hop into a match and play.
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Multiwinia is a stripped down and streamlined multiplayer-only version of its forebear, designed mostly as an add-on to the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Darwinia we're reviewing the PC standalone version that will retail at £20 or £15 for the downloadable version.
Like Lemmings, the player mostly exerts control over the Darwinians through indirect influence or by 'upgrading' them to controllable units the former, at least, hasn't changed.
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Your task is to rebuild the virtual ecosystem through a series of pseudo-RTS-style missions. Darwinia follows a race of virtual life forms, the Darwinians, whose simple server-side world (the eponymous Darwinia) is corrupted by a particularly nasty strain of virus, picked up from email spam. Some necessary background might be required to fully understand Multiwinia, however. All of these projects share the team's love of non-fussy, yet always engrossing, game mechanics and refreshingly lo-fi old-school charm. They're the guys behind the multi-award-winning Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia and now the latter game's follow-up, Multiwinia. If you're unfamiliar with the deliberately retro stylings of Britain's self-proclaimed Last of the Bedroom Programmers, then meet Introversion.