Multiwinia

>Implying that you can criticize a multiplayer game just for being multiplayer. Now that that's out of the way this is my first GOG review: I've been disappointed often by GOG's catalog far too often, and this is partly because of the misleading community ratings and reviews. Everybody gives games that I have come to hate very high ratings, and for all I know they give excellent games low ratings. Indie games are touted as being perfect, original, and unique while in reality they are mediocre games with about as much substance as a browser based flash player game. Older games are championed as "timeless classics" where their mechanics are horribly dated and the game is painful to play through. A timeless classic would be a game like Ocarina of Time. I'll let you know when I run into a game like that here (maybe Outcast?). I'm not saying that this is always the case with either category, maybe I've just had some bad luck, but this is all I've come to find of the games I've been purchasing on GOG. Smurfs are at the helm of user rated content, and that they are unworthy to rate any games is that they ALL use the same &quot&quot[insert random word that didn't need to be &quoted here]&quot&quot off of eachother. Who knows, maybe they actually believed they were being original or even funny. This is not a three star game. This deserves an equal or greater rating than the average community rating given to Darwinia, so I give it 5. Let's compare this game to the "perfect classic" Darwinia. This game controls much better than Darwinia. Tab is used to cycle through your special units saving time you might have spent incessantly clicking, promoting an officer requires only a right click again saving time, and also there's pathfinding again saving even more time. I probably missed a few things, or maybe I haven't, but generally the game is just more elegant to control. In Darwinia I found myself constantly fumbling through number keys whose units they corresponded to were always changing, and going in and out of the taskmanager (the ingame one) proved redundant and tedious enough where I started using the F hotkeys instead. Here you just press tab to cycle through and place or control the highlighted unit, and that tab key is in comfortable reach of your pinkey. Also, you can control Darwinians directly now. Some people argued that this is a contradiction to the idea of Darwinians having free will, but using officers to control the Darwinians is the same thing, just indirect. This direct control is limited enough that you'll still be using officers for pretty much everything, and using these officers is alot more fun too. These too save you from doing alot of clicking. The decision to not include pathfinding in the original Darwinia is often defended by the claim it was a "core design decision." The obvious fact of the mater is that Introversion was too lazy to include it into the original game. There's no story reasons for not including pathfinding unless maybe we're talking about the programs, and it only serves to make ordering things around tedious, so it is a fact that it adds nothing to the game unless you like having to click alot more often. The graphics are better. The polygons are still simple and the Darwinians are still flat, but everything looks much more crisp, this in addition to new more dynamic lighting. I haven't noticed any bugs (...holding... the urge... to say something unoriginal and unfunny...), particularly the random mouse movements, and/or the random jaggy mouse occurences from the original Darwinia, both of which could only be fixed by going into and out of windowed mode depending on your situation. About the only complaint I have is that you can't disable the extra factions on maps that support multiple factions, and the game while elegant in it's simplicity gets old fast because of said simplicity. I hadn't even beat Darwinia when I started playing this game. Jeez was it a breath of fresh air. If only there was some way to port the levels from Darwinia over to Multiwinia, the mechanics are so much better, and bug free (no pun in10ded! aeehm soo funny and original!).

this was defiantly worth the five dollars I paid for it. I bought this game a week ago and it still tickles my fancy. I still have not played original game Darwinia but looking at this game by itself, it is great.