A sky like Tron, flyers like Space Invaders, enemies like Centerpides and an overall minimalistic presentation. You stumble into Darwinia a digital playground that has been infected by an evil virus that turned most of the artificial life into monsters. So you are to help restoring the small digital souls into normal darwinians by killing the monsters, retrieve their "souls" and refine them ... but wait: first you got nothing. No big lasers, no motars, bazookas, air strikes. No refinery and no transports ... but you can find these techs and develop better versions. It plays fairly straight: summon a squad (a unit of 3 to 6 guys that do exactly what you want them to do) at the entering point and hunt enemies down. From time to time you conquer a new bulding or transportation point where you can summon troops from then on. Command & conquer - I would call it. A special treat are some details the developers made: Everytime you start the game you get a random intro, all little intros like the crack themes in the 80s or 90s. They implemented the option to summon units by drawing specific gestures, which works quite good. They tried to tell a story about a system that works like a religion: darwinian get born (a digital souls comes to their world), it lives an collects memories, dies and gets absorbed into a central repository. There the soul gets intermixed with all other souls and loses it's own specific memories by getting the memories and skills of all darwinians that lived before. Then it gets reborn again in order to evolve a bit more and so on. You will visit the place where the sould touch down on the world of Darwinia. You wll see the mines that provide raw materials for the little guys to buidl stuff. And you will see the place all utilized energy comes from. But the most important thing is to find the source of the virus! So grab a squad and go for it!
But it had some nice features that made me remember Elvolva. Your squad of genohunters are basically designed like a dungeon crawler party: a heavy butcher guy, a light speedy one and two that fill the gap between. I liked the way of evolving: you kill an amount of unknown enemies and get their speciality (i.e. fire breath or long jumping and a lot others in the process). With the collected sample DNS every squad member can evolve in two directions. Sometimes it is not reasonable to evolve a squad member, as the new features weaken some older ones. And the base values make some evolutions useless (a heavy fighter will never be a lightweight running scout and such things...). The principle of "the Lost Vikings" (i.e. every character can contribute to the process with his special skill) is implemented but not that strictly, so sometimes a genohunter is enough to deal with everything, sometimes you need a very certain skill combination. But hold on: that was the good part. Like some people wrote before: the handling is not that "evolved" and a map is missing, it can be quite boring to run around and simply following the all-knowing navigation pinpointer. And yes: Evolva lacks a tutorial. But if you like to discover strange games, that can also be fun ... Yet I had a nice time playing the game. So I conclude with 3 stars afterall.
I waited for this one, because it's one of my golden classics: easy to play, hard to master and soooo much fun. Design the rooms of your own hospital and work your way up from a small village to the big city. I always loved the crazy illnesses, the "theme series" typical handling and overall details. Bullfrog (best developer ever, imho) gives you so much to discover, see and laugh while rising the level step by step. And it gets messy quite fast, especially when a dozen new emergency cases make a run to your reception for immediate help - and they are all invisible! ;)
Grab your Keys, ammo packs and guns - login to intex systems and blow those aliens away!! I loved to play this one - it's creepy, it's quite hard (for an RTS lover like me ;) and the setting is simply ALIENS (the movie). Gauntlet/Commando 86 style you and maybe a good friend crawl through the levels to encounter a boss alien, close firedoors or simply blow everything up. To escape means to enter the next level. Sometimes aliens spawn a lot, espacially when you hesitate and the alien's spawn point is right outside to the screen's border. Master the labyrinth, prepare to run and manage those rare equipment parts, then you will be fine...
Well - it's been a while since I played this one, but I remmber it as a nice game that I actually finished. Back then I played a lot but I did not finish all of the games. The game feels lke a sci-fi version of Golden Axe with 3D elements.You can influence the camera, but there are parts where it just does not show you what is important. Like an oldschool left to right 2D action game (Double Dragon, Super Probotector or the Golden Axe I already mentioned). It is not that difficult to play, but a nice chilling thing to do. If you played it back then - buy it. If not, you might be disappointed. I love the title song of the game and still got the mp3 I made from my original CD.
I love the Battle Isle series. I played all and everything there was before Andorsian Conflict appeared. Allthough Incubation made me curse back then, I pre-ordered this game and couldn't wait to fight with tanks, buggies and Demon units again. And then this piece of ... software appeared. I installed it immediately the day it was delivered and could not believe what I bought: 20 minutes later I shut it down ... and left it ever since to stand next to the other installments of Battle Isle. I disliked 3 things right away: no hexagons for movement, instead some tiny squares to measure your troops movement (including there twist and turns); the need to support my troops with some kind of powerlines and distributors; all new troops - not a slowly starting introduction but BAM, here you are these units - go figure out what they are good for. I know - I could have ready the manual, but the other installments didn't need that to be understood. It has been quite a long time I tried Andorsian Conflict - and I went in, expecting of a "Battle Isle 3 with a modern 3D-Engine" thing, but old playing style. It disappointed me very much, but maybe I should give it another try, after all. Today I might just like it if I treat it not like a "Wannabe Battle Isle 3.5" :)
Oh - it is that game! I got it back then as a bonus game on a CD from a magazine. So not knowing what Slipstream 5000 might be, I installed it and got hooked for 3 weeks right away. It was the time I enjoyed games like Hi-Octane, Super Mario Kart (still, back then) and Megarace 2 ... at last for me :) Slipstream 5k is right there with the others titels - You hoover around in the canyon like tracks with something like 10 other pilots. 10 meters up or down and 20 to each side, that's your space. The Tracks are done quite good (if I remember correctly). Weapons aren't there as many as you might be used to nowadays. But one thing transported Slipstream better than other games: the feeling of speeding along a parcour. The other drives are quite small to be targeted and if you reach top speed, you really need to know the track, or you will smash right into the next wall or sharp curve. I prefer Hi-Octane and SMK, but it wasn't a bad game at all.
