Multiwinia

fun game — did a recent update break compatibility between Mac and PC for anybody else, though?

E

I didn't enjoy Darwinia much, so I wasn't expecting to enjoy Multiwinia either, but I figured I might as well check it out since I got both games in a bundle. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the things I disliked about Darwinia had been improved, like the painfully slow speed of units and some of the clunkyness around controlling them, and the game feels quite different in general. Unfortunately, despite the six different gamemodes and variety of different maps, it felt like this game got stale extremely quickly, and the gameplay just wasn't complex enough to stay interesting for long. Regardless of the ultimate objective, most of the gameplay involves selecting groups of units and moving them around the map. You don't really have much control over what they do. If there's something to interact with nearby, they'll probably interact with it. If there's enemies around, they'll probably attack. It's never quite guaranteed though, and sometimes they'll just stand around doing nothing, or wander away. The visual feedback from combat isn't great either, and it's hard to tell exactly why you're winning or losing battles other than the assumption that the winning side had a larger number of units. Crates can be added, which can be collected to provide various items, which make things a bit more interesting. However, where these items spawn is fairly random and feels pretty unfair sometimes, and the power of various items varies wildly, so adding crates does little more than add more luck to the game. You can play this game against friends online or against AI, and playing with friends is definitely more enjoyable, although the gameplay felt about the same in both cases. I don't know if that's because the AI is decent or if it's because this game is so simplistic that it's not hard to design an AI to play it. The game has the same low poly, simplistic aesthetic as Darwinia, and it looks neat. The game ran well, and I didn't encounter any obvious bugs, other than the same clunky controls when controlling the armor units that Darwinia had. [b]TL;DR[/b] This is an interesting sequel to Darwinia that shares the same aesthetic and has similar gameplay, although it makes some improvements to the speed of the game and the way units are controlled and used. The gameplay felt pretty simplistic though, with few objectives beyond trying to make sure you have more units than everyone else in every battle, and most additional complexity relies mainly on randomness, which doesn't feel satisfying either. Despite the fairly low price, I still can't recommend this game, as I just don't think there's enough entertaining content here to justify it.