Embarrassingly, I completely missed this. Only learned about it today. Introversion Software have a new game out! Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest was released on September 19th, so I’m rather late to the party here. Admittedly, I was on honeymoon when it came out, but I had no idea it even existed! And since I’m a fan of Introversion’s games, that’s a poor show on my part.
Multiwina is the sort-of sequel to 2005′s utterly brilliant Darwinia: a stripped-down RTS in which a virtual world populated by little flat stick-men has been infested with nasty viruses and it’s up to you to get rid of them all and return Darwinia to its utopian state.
Multiwinia takes place after Darwinia was saved from the viruses. Now the Darwinians have split into different tribes and are waging war on each other. It’s up to you to take control of one of the factions and beat all the others!
Except…
The story only exists on Multiwinia’s website. The actual game is story-less. It’s a collection of multiplayer game modes (King of the Hill, Domination and so on), with up to 4 players. You can play all of the maps in singleplayer mode, with the computer AI filling in for human opponents, but there’s no ‘Campaign’ mode. That’s a shame, in my opinion, since I’m not much of a multiplayer gamer. I really only play singleplayer games, and a ‘beat one map to unlock the next’ progression model, with a story attached to the maps would have been a dream come true. Of course, it would really have been an expansion pack for Darwinia if that was the case, but that would have been no bad thing.
Also slightly disappointing is Multiwinia’s interface. It’s very easy to navigate, which is excellent, but Darwinia had geeky in-jokes (such as fake pirate intros of the sort that I remember from my C64 and Amiga-playing days), and a nice sweeping cinematic camera intro, and the front-end was just a map of the Darwinia world, with available locations highlighted. It had charm. Multiwinia feels a bit soulless. Flat, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Of course, that’s all window-dressing, so to speak. The only real important thing is how Multiwinia plays. Luckily, it plays brilliantly. I’ve been glued to it all morning. It’s a really stripped-down RTS (hardly any unit types, no resource management, no possibility of tank-rushing or turtling) in which you just fight the other factions. You’re in battle within seconds, and the fighting just continues until either time runs out or the other players are wiped out. It’s frenetic and brilliant for it. It’s got definite just-one-more-go addictiveness, and for £15 you’d be a fool not to buy it. It’s also pretty forgiving in terms of system requirements:
- 2.0 GHz CPU
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows XP or Vista
- GeForce 6200 or Radeon 9600 series
- Internet Connection for multiplayer games
And it only takes up 62 megabytes of hard drive space!
