Game Review: Darwinia
As I'm sure you've all realized from my previous posts about the annual Independent Games Festival, some of my favorite games of the year tend to come from the participants. Darwinia, despite a few technical problems towards the end-game, has once again proven to me that an indie game studio can create something with such grip that it can keep me coming back until I complete the game.
In a nutshell, the premise of Darwinia is that a scientist named Dr Sepulveda has created a sentient evolving life form called the Darwinians which live inside a virtual world running entirely inside a computer network. The Darwinians evolved so far that they found a way to connect themselves to the Internet which exposed their world to a computer virus that has multiplied out of control. The player's goal (after stumbling onto this struggle between the Darwinians and the virus) is to help destroy the virus and save the Darwinians from extinction.
I found the overall graphical style to be very nostalgic toward the early wire-frame style graphics of video games that I used to play back in the late 80's through early-90's. The virtual world which the Darwinians inhabit is very stylized and has a Tronish feel to it with pixelized edges and soft electronic glow lighting effects. The individual objects inhabiting the world such as representations of the virus and the objects that the player can control like engineer programs and offensive unit programs are all 3D, however the Darwinians and viral, "evil" Darwinians are essentially 2D objects roaming about a 3D world, which is an interesting twist on the representation of the world's inhabitants. The musical score, mostly by Trash80, and sound effects were also very retro and brought back memories of the early arcade games like Pacman and Centipede which combined with the graphical style created a very enjoyable and compelling representation of the game events and matched the premise of the game very well.
The narrative of the game I found quite compelling and very well executed. There were enough cut-scenes to explain where the game was going without them being overly lengthy or completely unnecessary. I won't elaborate much on the game's narrative because a lot of the enjoyment for me while playing this game was discovering the world of the Darwinians and their back-story as Dr Sepulveda divulged bits and pieces in-between each level.
The premise of how the player interacts with the objects in the game world is indicative of the environment that the game is set in. Since the entire world exists within a computer, everything that exists is essentially a running program; the Darwinians, the representations of the virus, and the objects that the player can control. Thus, the player only has a set amount of memory within the computer with which to run programs. The programs are then represented in the game world as various 3D objects, such as an engineering program that can repair structures, a squad program which can be used to mount an offensive against viral infections, or even an armored transport that can move groups of Darwinians around the game world and turn into a giant Darwinian powered cannon. Because of this resource limitation, the player can only run a limited number of programs at any given time, and programs can be run or terminated just as easily as you could run them on a "real" computer, starting and stopping them at any time. Previously I did not include the Darwinians in the group of objects that the player controls. This was deliberate, as one of the key properties of how the player interacts with the game world is that the player has no direct control over the Darwinians themselves. Eventually the player will begin to get new and upgraded programs which can influence or transport the Darwinians from Dr. Sepulveda as he realizes that the player is much better at combating the virus than he is and decides to move into a support role to create new and improved programs for the player to wield against the viral infection.
The control scheme that I began playing the game with was gesture based. This proved a little difficult in the beginning because the gesture recognition system wouldn't always recognize what I was wanting to do, and many times if I hadn't used a certain program for a while I would forget the gesture for it and have to look it up in the user interface. After a patch which upgraded my system to the most recent version of the game (more on why I patched in a moment), the default control scheme was changed to a menu-based method which I found much easier to work with, since many times with the gesture method I was in the menus looking up the gestures anyway. Both control schemes were still available after the patch, but apparently players must have had enough issues with the original control scheme for Introversion to add the new scheme as the default and make the gesture-based one the alternative.
I very much enjoyed progressing through this game, until I began to reach the last few levels. About two levels prior to the final level the game began to run very sluggishly. The level maps had become so large and so populated that the game literally began to crawl at an extremely low frame-rate and a noticeable lag on user input appeared. I blame this partially on my playing style which had by this time become a polished Darwinian creating machine which funneled my little buddies into the most recently controlled area of whatever map I happened to be playing on, amassing a huge Darwinian army poised to flood into the next area, blitzkrieg style. In effect, I had created a constant stream of new objects for the game to track, and if I didn't finish the map quickly, I had literally thousands of Darwinians swarming all over the place. Regardless, a P4 2.7GHz with a Gig of RAM with no other applications running still shouldn't have been brought to it's knees. After patching to the latest version of the game and reviewing the support information on the website, it seemed that much of the game's resources were devoted to real-time sound effects tied to in-game events, so I disabled those and turned some of the graphics settings down a bit. That only seemed to help a little, so I turned all of the graphics options ALL the way down. This returned the game to a playable state, although when zoomed out to see the entire map there was still a noticeable lag as the game attempted to track all of the objects on-screen, and the game was much less visually appealing in this state. Playable enough to continue however I was able to reach the final level, which would then consistently crash the game mid-way through.
After a few attempts at the crashing final level, defeated, I put Darwinia aside in favor of my non-crashing Nintendo DS and World of Warcraft, never having completed that final map.
However, as a testament to the enjoyment I received from this game and the desire to see the mission that the narrative had created within me through to the end, occasionally over the past few months my mind would drift back to the world of Darwinia. Unfortunately I never made time to e-mail Introversion Support and report the crashing problem, and eventually, slacking paid off... At some point they released a new patch which has seemed to fix the problem I was having. After patching to the most recent version, I was able to (although still sluggishly) finish that final map by wiping out the viral infection completely. And what a reward for completing the game! In the end, Dr. Sepulveda essentially hands you the keys to the kingdom and the ability to create your own maps for the Darwinians to inhabit via access to the map editor.
If you enjoy the genre of "god games", or your just nostalgic for the stylization of Tron, you should definitely try this game. It's an interesting hybrid-twist on the "god games" and RTS genres. At the very least, every gamer should play through the demo. The demo is freely available and does an extremely good job of introducing the game, controls, and story while giving the player a small taste of what is to come. I do however suggest a more tactical approach to solving the maps than my method of simply overwhelming the virus with exponentially greater numbers of Darwinians, less you may run into similar technical difficulties as myself.