Disclaimer
"Ramblings of a Moron" is a review series done by WSGF member Cynagen. While reviews from other sites focus on extensive play and detailed postmortem analysis, "Ramblings of a Moron" is a first impression "stream of consciousness" review. The grammar isn't perfect, and the prose can sometimes be disjointed, but these are the first impressions of a seasoned WSGF Insider. For more information, and for more Ramblings, see the complete list of Cynagen's offerings.
The Rambling
Eliminate, and or Dominate. These are your basic goals in all things Multiwinia, the multiplayer spawn of the award-winning Darwinia. Here you're tasked with 1 of 6 different challenges, some harder than others. Classical modes such as Domination (deathmatch), King of the Hill, and Capture the Statue, will lend themselves to classic multiplayer feel, while the newer combat scenarios Assault (assault a heavily defended fort), Rocket Riot (be the first to launch), and Blitzkrieg (hardcore capture the flag), give quite a bit more difficulty and unique essence.
Pew pew pew, "AUUUGGGGHHHH", *running around on fire*. These are typical actions of your Multiwinians while playing this wonderfully designed and thought out game. They're funny, cute, or just down right disturbing depending on your stomach. Now while this is a well thought out game, there are still some severe pitfalls it cannot avoid; It's an RTS game, and therefore is subject to fall under such scrutiny against giants like World In Conflict, or the ever popular Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. However, considering this is RTS on the most simplistic scale I've seen to date on a computer game, I'll shy away from doing so. That being said, make a bad move with your troops, and you're most certainly marching (if they're under a commander), or walking (free-roam Multiwinians) to their deaths, just like any other RTS.
Now I'm going to speak of my games with P-Storm earlier this week, as it's the freshest memories of the game, and it did reveal quite a few things I don't think I would have encountered playing by myself. Firstly, one of the game's training maps has a huge flaw, where, given enough luck and good timing, a single player (cpu or human) can take control of multiple outer islands, leaving the game in a virtual stalemate. Now while I was in the lead with said stalemate, the game did compensate by giving P-Storm and the CPU player crates with all sorts of wicked things to use against my massed forces, such as annoying anthills, meteor showers, and even a homage to Defcon, a nuke strike launched by submarine outlines pulled from Defcon itself. Trailing dashes following the outlined nukes and all. We even encountered the game introducing us to the Evilwinians, a race of pure black Multiwinians whose sole purpose was to otherwise create chaos, and spawn all sorts of virii from Darwinia, only after eliminating the previous computer entity used to fill out the third spot. After winning through fun little tricks (pointing radar-based Multiwinian transporters away from adjacent enemy islands), and a large amount of turtling, we moved on to test out other maps and modes. Rocket Riot was much fun, but I'll leave that to P-Storm to speak of, since he won that map hands down (and completely humiliated me). We next tried the Assault mode, setting ourselves as the attackers and leaving the computer to defend itself against our onslaught. After quickly figuring out that attacking from 4 seperate points with at least 5 turrets in direct firing range on each corner was an excercise in futility, I instead turned to focus my troops into one point on one of the sides of the base in the center, and this worked so much better, much to my surprise, after making a few successful assaults upon the lower levels, it was time to move up to the second and final level of this base. With a proper application of a Meteor Storm, this was relatively easy, and the game was won with little return fire, a satisfying, yet at the same time, unfulfilling victory. The game had let me down, and sadly this was not the first time.
The game's AI is lacking in some places, making brash decisions that it can't back up/re-enforce or doing something as stupid as disconnecting a radar beam with 40+ Multiwinians still in transit, killing them in the process. These were things I could not see a human player doing unless they were in a dire situation that called for such a move, but I'll let this not bug me as much. Other things that did bother me, was the fact that it can be easy to turtle your troops, and still win depending on the game's initial setup. This was made abundantly clear with the first match free for all between myself and P-Storm, whether this was of purposeful design by Introversion, or an oversight, I'm not one hundered percent sure, but I'm sure it's not the only map and or mode where this can be done. The one thing that bothers me quite the most, is if sales of the game have been even half as stellar as Darwinia, where are all the players? I have quite a hard time finding games online with total strangers, and it's not because I have a retail copy, I get the same server list on the Steam version as well, and it's pretty much playerless. There are around 20 servers always on, but never any players, and that makes me sad as I would much rather prefer to play this with a human than the computer, it IS a multiplayer game afterall, with heavy emphasis on the multiplayer.
Graphics: 10/10 - This game is consistent with it's hits Darwinia, and Defcon.
Audio: 7/10 - While all the little sounds of battle and your Multiwinians dying are being heard, the soundtrack just detracts from it.
Action: 9/10 - With just the right settings like what I used for our Rocket Riot, it can get very fast paced.
Re-playability: 7/10 - With limited online play with other humans, this really does make the game only good for killing time in small batches, you don't even feel bad for not completing the game and leaving early.
Value to Cost: 8/10 - This is fun, but like I mentioned, lack of humans now, and lack of motivation to rekindle and keep the community alive hold this back.
Overall Rating: 82% - If you're a fan of Darwinia and other Introversion software titles, then you'll enjoy this title.
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