Introduction
Multiwinia is, as you probably guessed already, if not from anything else, the Steam Update News propaganda flashing up every ten seconds, the multiplayer version of Darwinia, created by the developers of Defcon, so it can't go wrong can it? Well let's see...
Gameplay
The gameplay is a little different than what you've seen in Darwinia.
Six gamemodes are present in the game:
* Domination, which is not Domination, rather Last Man Standing
* King of the Hill, with multiple hills, you could just call it King of Fucking Alps Scored Per Mountain.
* Assault, a basic attack/defend mode
* Capture The Status, a capture the flag gamemode
* Blitzkrieg, which is basically Onslaught from UT
* Rocket Riot, which is basically a fusion of the earlier mentioned King of Fucking Alps and Headquarters from CoD.
Each of these modes is played with 2-4 players, what an epic amount of Multiplayer.
Now while all these modes are different, there's two static goals in each and every one of them: Capture Spawn Points and Capture Control Point. Spawn Points will non-stop generate new Darwinians for you, up to a maximum of X per point. X is somewhere between 50 and 100 far as I noticed. Control Points let you control teleport beams of doom called Radars, you can monopolize them and change their exit points.
You can control your darwins, although there is no drag selection, only that if you hold down your left button, you get a nice blue circle selecting everything inside it. This is pretty annoying, since your Darwinians spawn from Y different spawn points, Y being your total number of spawn points, and there are still Darwinians at Z other locations, where Z is control points, scoring areas, and frontlines. Fortunately, you can designate officers, which either tell Darwinians where to go or can lead a Formation, which is slow and shitty but hey you can at least move the Darwinians in bulks..
Now for a bit of randomness, there are crate drops, which are FUCKING POINTLESS. Crates can contain such caliber powerups (for example Air Strikes, Egg Drops, Big Fucking Transport Hovercrafts) that can easily turn around the game. There was also a big effort done to attempt to balance the game and fail miserably, for example, in the server settings, the losing players can have handicap bonus, which makes their Darwinians spawn faster, and Crate Drops can be weighted to drop near the losing players, which means Losing is actually a winning tactic in this game. Now tell me how does that make sense. And if that's not enough, you can enable Revengay Mode, which means players who are already out (which means less than 5 darwins and no spawn points) get Crate Powerups every few seconds or so. It happened to me. On the second tutorial, I killed the Red Player, and after that he started dropping fucking eggs on me every 2 seconds, which means after a minute, I was hosting a goddamn zoo on my home island.
The game has no story, if you want that, go play Darwinia.
Sights and Sounds
The game has an excellent theme in graphics, but is just plain in sounds. Most of the time you'll hear only lasers firing, which made me play without headphones on for the last 30 minutes or so.
The camera control is a little bit odd to me. You move the camera with W,A,S,D (A and D being "strafe") on the 2D plane and you can zoom in or out with the mouse wheels. However, the camera's rotation follows the mouse which is weird and annoys the fuck out of me sometimes.
There are 8-10 levels per gamemode, and no editor at all.
Stuff that sucks
As I said before, crates, revengay mode, pussyfication mode and so on just imbalance the game in an attempt to balance it.
Then there is also the Single Player mode (game against CPU only) which there basically ISN'T. Each time I went into Singleplayer Mode, by the time I set it up, there were literally three other players in my game, which makes me wonder why the Multiplayer Host option is in the game. And the fact that there is no chat before I start the game pretty much put me off from any further trying because frankly I'd rather play the original Darwinia than tell off all the people that play after starting the game and repeat it until they consider me a fucker enough not to joiin ever again.
Next, the gamemodes. I'd say this game wants to rip off everything else pretty mediocrely. A game with such an unique theme should have something unique, although admittedly the gamemodes work, they're pretty similar anyway.
The AI is piss. It's unorganized, it's slow in the beginning and you can easily beat the hard CPU without much effort. At the highest difficulty level, what I want is challenge. I still remember the Brutal CPU in C&C 3 which probably had a Tech Center before I barely had two power plants up. THAT is challenge my dear Introvision Software.
The game advertises itself as a Strategy game, but I'd say it's a Racing game as in who can waste more of their units to accomplish a retarded goal. It's like sending a fucking army into the enemy's kitchen to steal their breakfast. A strategy game is about using your limited resources to get the most out of yourself, sit quietly and gather, and quite franky even World in Conflict is like a professional match of Chess compared to this. So if you like blood-boiling action games with little connection to strategy, this game is for you.
Conclusion
Multiwinia is probably nothing new. It's the same old Darwinia, but now you can play against the same old dumb CPUs in a different scenario, or well online.
Score : 7.5
Uncle Baliame recommends it to those who liked Defcon or Darwinia, otherwise this game is not going to be the fucking enlightenment making you suddenly worship flat green people.