You may not realise it, but you’ve probably heard of Eufloria already. It made waves as a finalist in this year’s IGF Festival under the moniker of “Dyson”, and for all the reasons you’d expect. It has striking minimalist watercolour-styled graphics, beautifully atmospheric music and sound, and procedurally-generated assets. What really catches your attention, however, is its premise. It’s a real-time strategy game, where you create space colonies using trees.
I once baked a really awesome Oreo cake. It took a whole afternoon of some serious baking, and I even pulled in a couple of friends to help me do it. Going through each step, I feverishly awaited the moment when I could sink my teeth into the decadent and sinful combination of chocolate in chocolate, topped with chocolate, filled with chocolate and served with a side of chocolate.
It ended up being a huge mess.
The original version of this game spent some time at the top of Konkregate‘s most popular games list, looking very smugly at all the other games below it who scrabbled for the lower podium positions; it held a similar accolade for even longer under the strategy subcategory. Then the 1.5 update of the game traipsed onto Kongregate and managed to retain and refresh interest in the game, and, in fact, in the flash tower defence genre, for far longer than most people expected, racking up nearly 6 and a halfmillion plays on Kongregate alone, the third highest on the site. This is, of course, the very same site that hosts incredibly well polished games such as Sonny, as well as personal favourites, Fancy Pants Adventures and The Last Stand.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 27, released in November 2008.
Anybody who’s played Introversion’s seminal strategy/action game Darwinia will know the joys of having thousands of little flat men marching across the map in a long green column, leaving the glittering red digital souls of dead virii in their wake. It probably occurred to you that two or more such armies colliding would make for one epic battle. Well, it seems that Introversion agrees with you on that one, because (as our preview two issues ago revealed) they’ve been hard at work on Multiwinia, a brand new stand-alone multiplayer pseudo-sequel to Darwinia. So now that it’s finally been released, how does it measure up? Read on.
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